Dr. Matthieu Chapman previews his forthcoming book, Shakespeare and Antiblack World-making , in which reflects on the fields of Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies and Early Modern Studies. He discusses why he portrays Shakespeare as the ultimate colonizer, his sentiments about the ideal of ‘reading generously” and its connection to universality, and how the field of Early Modern Studies was built on the denials of the very concept of race.
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Calling Slow Noodles her one story, Chantha Nguon recounts being hesitant to write about her life until her collaborator, Kim Green, suggested that she write a recipe book. When she began reviving these food-related memories, she didn’t realize they would lead to her telling her life story. Here, she talks about Year Zero, food and hunger, and her work experience in NGOs, the creation of Stung Treng Women’s Development Center, and the significance of ‘slow noodles’. To support Chantha’s work, pl...
May 28, 2025•38 min
Following Chemistry and Joan Is Okay , Weike Wang again reflects on labor, home, place, and identity in Rental House , a novel that follows an interracial couples’ two vacations. She describes how Keru and Nate’s marriage is one that is ubiquitous in America but is hardly written about in the literary world. We also discuss race and class analysis, DINK (double income, no kids), politics as a source of inspiration, and our writing preferences and challenges.
Apr 03, 2025•46 min
Brandon Shimoda discusses his pursuit of similar questions during his writing and research for his two longer books, The Grave on the Wall and The Afterlife is Letting Go , which are about Japanese American history, incarceration, violence, colonialism, ancestors, and family history. Both works are a blend of poetry and prose, which are woven as interviews, verse, and personal stories, and reflect Shimoda’s sentiment that his understanding of form relates to feelings....
Mar 07, 2025•49 min
Chen Chen talks about genre, creative writing pedagogy, race, and politics as he reflects on his two full-length poetry collections, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA Editions). On the topic of contextual and cultural references, we discussed our displeasure of the general tendency to reference Wong Kar-wai purely for aesthetic reasons without critiquing the politics of nostalgia....
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 4 min
To celebrate Halloween and the season of extremes, K-Ming Chang returns to discuss Organ Meats , which is the final story in her mythic triptych (or what she calls the “fecal trio”). She extends her thoughts on experimenting with maximalist language first and making metaphors literal. She also reflects on her process writing the tonally different novella Cecilia , which features her usual meditations on matriarchal storytelling, intimacies, and relationships, and her focus on labor....
Oct 29, 2024•46 min
Aditi Machado previews her upcoming poetry collection, Material Witness (Nightboat Books), and reflects on the concept and act of "witnessing". Witnessing then makes its poetic way into her questions of human/non-human relationality, plurality of subjects, language and etymology, and how we experience the world.
Sep 30, 2024•40 min
Morgan Talty shares his thoughts on this peculiar thing called genre and his experiences writing short stories ( Night of the Living Rez ) and a novel (his debut, Fire Exit ). We talk about his reasons for writing from the perspective of a white character, and the bigger questions of colonization, the limitations of blood quantum, law, and the legal fictions associated with race and ideology.
Aug 29, 2024•47 min
My diaCritics book review focused and critiqued this ever recurring topic of nostalgia in diasporic memoirs, and Lieu shares her own thoughts on critical nostalgia, its connection to the tragedy of the living, and her desire to excavate her family memories. In capturing life as a Vietnamese American daughter in California during the 1990s, Lieu reflects on writing The Manicurist’s Daughter , which originally began as a tale of vengeance, her cultural-specific references, dialogue in Vietnamese, ...
Jul 31, 2024•52 min
To think about sex work differently, Dr. Juana María Rodríguez (University of California, Berkeley) argues that we too will need to think about sex differently. Specifically, her project argues against merely ending the discussion at decriminalization, which essentializes sex work as stigma turned into law. In Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex , she connects state surveillance and the visual archives with the racialized discourses of sex work while highlighting queer and trans communities, ...
May 29, 2024•46 min
Erica N. Cardwell reflects on writing Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art , a possible anti-memoir that features essays on the importance of art criticism, visuality, grief, and radical Black imagination. Because the visual aspects of Cardwell's stories and analysis are so striking, she also shares stories of the art featured on the book cover and accompanying essays.
Mar 29, 2024•37 min
Dr. Matthieu Chapman discusses his experiences with genre shift from academic writing to his beautiful hybrid memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life . He shares his thoughts on craft, genre, “the canon” in Early Modern Studies, the fallacy that Shakespeare is inclusive, and the importance of Afropessimism.
Feb 29, 2024•56 min
At the beginning of the new year, I talked to Athena Dixon about the release of her latest book, The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays . She shares how the book came to be and how she interrogated the concept of loneliness in all of its manifestations through research, personal life, fandoms, pop culture, technology, the pandemic, and more.
Jan 31, 2024•40 min
In Nishanth Injam's stunning debut collection, The Best Possible Experience , examines the social ails of life abroad as an adult immigrant. In the episode, Nishanth discusses how fragments and contours of his personal life weave into his fiction as a way to translate, preserve, and document memories of home and family. He also shares his thoughts on technology and labor, craft decisions, and more.
Dec 11, 2023•39 min
In her debut book, A Flat Place: A Memoir , Dr. Noreen Masud traces the longstanding impacts of colonialism in flat places and landscapes while sharing intimate stories of her formative years in Pakistan, her family, trauma and therapy, and her sojourns to Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney. In the interview, we also address the two different subtitles in their respective U.K. and U.S. contexts, the possibility of being misread as reparative, and much more.
Aug 16, 2023•43 min
What would resistance against capitalism and neoliberalism look like in the intimate sphere is one of the major questions Sophie K. Rosa reflects upon in her debut book, Radical Intimacy . Thinking through many social movements (Black Lives Matter, climate justice, FreeBritney, political scandals in the U.K.), she shares her thoughts on using theoretical language (e.g., Sophie Lewis’s work on abolition in family and Dr. Kim Tallbear’s scholarship on anticolonial perspective on kinship, love, and...
Jul 27, 2023•37 min
Mai Nardone talks about his first book, the story collection Welcome Me to the Kingdom , which spans four decades and traces urbanization of the late 1980s, the financial crisis of 1997, and the current landscape in Thailand. He talks about his studies in economics and how this perspective shaped the focus on labor and the many industries (tourism, sex), racialization, travel, religious communities in Thailand, and writing against the global imagination of the country.
Jun 29, 2023•43 min
Lamya H. speaks about writing an unapologetically queer and Muslim text in her debut work, Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir , which chronicles her formative years in a Middle Eastern country and her continuing education in the United States. She recalls writing “Hajar” as a standalone essay, and how she formed and shaped a narrative arc that shaped the memoir extrapolating foundational texts like the Quran to share stories about her upbringing, relationships, academia, critical nostalgia, geographies...
Jun 08, 2023•34 min
Rebecca May Johnson charts her writing and thinking processes in what became her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen , a text that embodies and challenges notions of language and form, recipe writing, domestic spaces, performativity, and the body and labor, all of which gestures to the possibilities and pleasures of the text. She shares how writing her dissertation on The Odyssey is an allegorical, shadow text to the epic in Small Fires , memoir vs./or epic, her travels in Arkansas, ...
May 18, 2023•49 min
Dr. Allan E.S. Lumba (Concordia University), author of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines , discusses critically examining the seemingly quotidian object of money to write about the history of the Philippines by engaging questions of racial capitalism and hierarchies, imperialism, unconditional decolonization, and materialism. In the interview, he also shares insights on the evergreen topics of interdisciplinarity, narrativizing the archives,...
Apr 06, 2023•52 min
In anticipation of his debut novel, Jinwoo Chong shares the genealogy of writing Flux , an ambitious novel told through multiple perspectives. Chong talks about being inspired by Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and weaving them into a complex novel that examines multiple discourses, including technocapitalism, overblown promises of technology, nostalgia, pop culture, representation, and much more.
Mar 15, 2023•41 min
Morgan Talty’s debut story collection, Night of the Living Rez , poignantly contemplates, examines, subverts idealized understandings of community, intergenerational trauma, and life on a reservation in Maine. In weaving the story collection together, he shares his writing practice, a desire to write sparingly and to gesture to the importance of omitted details without fetishizing pain and trauma.
Feb 16, 2023•39 min
Su Cho’s debut poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish , examines the stories of language through relationships, food, space, and places. She shares how she resisted the urge to be concerned with accuracy when including Korean characters and words; instead, she chose to portray being stuck in language, to capture the symmetry and asymmetry of language and translation.
Feb 02, 2023•40 min
Lyzette Wanzer ruminates on the events leading up to the conception of her edited volume Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives . As she breaks down the four sections of the anthology, she discusses the historical and ongoing racism through the policing of natural hair, racial justice, intergenerational trauma, the creation of Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (C.R.O.W.N. Act), collaboration, and writing across genres.
Jan 19, 2023•38 min
Cija Jefferson reflects on her experiences in an MFA program, craft, community, and revision. Her MFA project, Sonic Memories and Other Essays , is her first book, in which nine essays capture different stages of the writer as she frames sounds and silences to capture adulthood, grief, loss, and time.
Jan 03, 2023•37 min
Dure Aziz Amna talks about writing her debut novel, American Fever , using tuberculosis as a motif to explore questions of who is responsible for high school exchange student Hira’s health and nourishment in the alleged land of opportunity and abundance. She shares how she was interested in interrogating how culture -- and food -- are formed and deformed when transported from Pakistan to the United States.
Dec 09, 2022•34 min
Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico) shares how her research on the history of social movements, subculture activist archives, Germany, and Black Studies shaped her monograph, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement . As she discusses some of the topics explored in her book - collectivity, quotidian intellectuals, and Germany's erasure of its own colonial history - and how voices in the diaspora in their regional/local contexts belong i...
Nov 21, 2022•49 min
Nguyễn An Lý talks about her experiences as a translator, especially in reference to Thuận’s atmospheric Chinatown . Using the novel as a focal point, she also elaborates on readership, audience expectations, the idea of cultural tourism, Chinatown as a physical and metaphorical space, and her work with Zzz Review .
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Dr. Reighan Gillam (University of Southern California) discusses how her fieldwork and research on media producers in Brazil shaped her first monograph Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media . She speaks on how her work in anthropology intersects with media and race studies, antiracist visual politics, alternative media in Brazil, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and the question of ethics in research.
Oct 13, 2022•39 min
Belinda Huijuan Tang recollects how emotionally resonant family stories inspired her debut novel A Map for The Missing and connects the gaokao (the standardized college entrance exam) with the years 1977, 1982, and 1993 as major historical and cultural moments in China. In the episode, Belinda also discusses the ideal of education as upward mobility, the politicization in education, and how the idea of citizenship can change in the course of one’s life.
Sep 01, 2022•36 min
