Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Sarah Kendzior. Her new book, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, is available from Flatiron Books.

 

 

This is Sarah’s second time on the podcast. She first appeared in Episode 516 on April 25, 2018.

She is best known for her reporting on St. Louis and the 2016 election, her academic research on authoritarian states, and her New York Times bestselling debut The View from Flyover Country. She is a co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation and was named one of Foreign Policy’s “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in Politico, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The New York Times, Globe and Mail, and more. She lives in St. Louis.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Jenn Shapland. Her debut, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, is a genre-bending work of nonfiction. It is available from Tin House Books.

 

Shapland’s nonfiction has been published in O, the Oprah Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Outside ​online, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism. She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and lives in New Mexico.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Deb Olin Unferth. Her new novel Barn 8 is available from Graywolf Press. It is the official March pick of the TNB Book Club.

 

This is Deb’s second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 178 on May 29, 2013.

Unferth is the author of six books, including Wait Till You See Me Dance and Revolution. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Paris Review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Monika Woods. She is a literary agent and founder of Triangle House Literary in New York.

 

Woods’ clients have won the PEN Bingham Award, been listed for the National Book Award, The Kirkus Prize, The Edgar Awards, LAMBDA Awards, and the Believer Book Award, appeared on the New York Timesbestseller list, and been named books of the year by The New York Timesand NPR, among other honors.

She is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo and the Columbia Publishing Course and has worked closely with leading voices in contemporary literature over her decade-long publishing career. Her interests include literary fiction and compelling non-fiction in cultural criticism, food, popular culture, journalism, science, and current affairs.

She is particularly excited about plot-driven literary novels, non-fiction that is creatively critical, unique perspectives, a great cookbook, and above all, original prose.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Sam Farahmand. His debut novel, Chimero, is available from dr.Doctor Press.

 

Farahmand is originally from Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Hobart, and PANK Magazine.

He lives in Nashville.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Erin Eileen Almond. Her debut novel, Witches’ Dance, is available from Lanternfish Press.

Almond is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and reviewer. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe, Colorado Review, Normal School, Small Spiral Notebook,and on Cognoscenti.com, and The Rumpus.net.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with April Dávila . Her debut novel, 142 Ostriches, is available from Kensington Books.

 

Dávila received her undergraduate degree from Scripps College before going on to study writing at USC. She was a resident of the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in 2017 and attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2018. In 2019 her short story “Ultra” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A fourth-generation Californian, she lives in La Cañada Flintridge with her husband and two children. She is a practicing Buddhist, half-hearted gardener, and occasional runner. 142 Ostriches is her first novel.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Emily Nemens. Her debut novel, The Cactus League, is available from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

 

In 2018, Nemens became the seventh editor of The Paris Review, the nation’s preeminent literary quarterly. Since her arrival, the magazine has seen record-high circulation, published two anthologies, produced a second season of its acclaimed podcast, and won the 2020 National Magazine Award for Fiction. Previously, she coedited The Southern Review, a storied literary quarterly published at Louisiana State University. Stories published during her tenure at The Southern Review were selected for the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize anthology, and the inaugural edition of PEN America Best Debut Fiction.

Nemens grew up in Seattle and received her bachelor’s degree from Brown University, where she studied art history and studio art. She completed an MFA degree in fiction at Louisiana State University. As an illustrator, she’s collaborated with Harvey Pekar, published her work in The New Yorker, and her watercolor portraits of every woman in congress were featured across the web and on national TV. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird (Tarumoto Prize winner), Esquire, n+1, The Iowa Review, Hobart, and The Gettysburg Review. She lives in New York and remains a Mariners fan.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Megan Fernandes. Her new poetry collection, Good Boys, is available from Tin House Books. It was a finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize and the Saturnalia Book Prize.

 

Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, The Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is also the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015).

An Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, Fernandes teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Nicolette Polek. Her new story collection, Imaginary Museums, is available from Soft Skull Press.

 

Polek is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio and is a recipient of the 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Amina Cain. Her new novel, Indelicacy, is available from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

 

This is Amina’s second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 390 on November 25, 2015.

She is also the author of the short story collection Creature, out with Dorothy, a publishing project, and her writing has appeared in Granta, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, Full Stop, Vice, the Believer Logger, and elsewhere.

She lives in Los Angeles and is a literature contributing editor at BOMB.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Milo Martin. He is the author of the poetry collections Poems for the Utopian Nihilist (Echo Park Press) and the forthcoming sublemon/sublime. He is also collaborating on an upcoming art book with Gigi Spratley and Jack Waltrip.

A poet by trade, Martin has toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe. He has been invited to perform at international literature and poetry festivals in France, Italy, Germany and Croatia as well as numerous venues in Estonia, Switzerland, Holland, Liechtenstein and Serbia. His works have been translated into four languages. Educated at San Francisco State University and the University of Southern California, he currently resides in Los Angeles. He contends that birds and insects are manifest angels.

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Mark Guerin is the guest. His debut novel, You Can See More From Up Here, is available from Golden Antelope Press. It is the official December pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.

 

Guerin is a 2014 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program in Boston. He also has an MFA from Brandeis University and is a winner of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, the Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting and Sigma Tau Delta’s Eleanor B. North Poetry Award. A contributor to the novelist’s blog, Dead Darlings, he is also a playwright, copywriter and journalist. He currently resides in Harpswell, Maine, with his wife, Carol, and two Brittany Spaniels.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Tim O’Brien. He is the author of The Things They Carried, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. And he is the recipient of the 1979 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Going After Cacciato. His latest book, a memoir, is called Dad’s Maybe Book, available now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

 

O’Brien was born in 1946 in Austin, Minnesota, and spent most of his youth in the small town of Worthington, Minnesota. He graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968. From February 1969 to March 1970 he served as infantryman with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, after which he pursued graduate studies in government at Harvard University. He worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post from 1973 to 1974.

His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, and Ploughshares, and in several editions of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 1987, O’Brien received the National Magazine Award for the short story, “The Things They Carried,” and in 1999 it was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. O’Brien is the recipient of literary awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been elected to both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. O’Brien currently holds the University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. He lives with his wife and children in Austin, Texas.

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Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with Fiona Alison Duncan. Her debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa, is available from Soft Skull Press.

Duncan is a Canadian-American artist, writer and organizer. She is the founding host of Hard to Read, a lit series, and Pillow Talk, community organizing on sex, love and communication. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

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