First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing - podcast cover

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Mitzi Rapkincms.megaphone.fm
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, non-fiction, essay, and poetry writers. First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing highlights the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. This weekly show hosted by Mitzi Rapkin is a celebration of creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
Last refreshed:
Follow this podcast in the Metacast mobile app to refresh it and see new episodes.
Download Metacast podcast app
Podcasts are better in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episodes

First Draft - Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, named an Indie Next Pick; one of the most anticipated books of 2017 by Buzzfeed, BookRiot, and the Huffington Post; a must-read for May by Goodreads, Audible.com, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple and People; and one of the 10 best books of the year so far by Entertainment Weekly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 26, 201736 min

First Draft - Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on “This American Life”. Her newest memoir is called Hourglass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 19, 201739 min

First Draft - Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott is the Edgar-winning author of the novels Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me and The Fever. Her most recent book is You Will Know Me, which was chosen one of Best Books of 2016 by NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Time Out NY, the Washington Post, Google, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 12, 201738 min

First Draft - Chavisa Woods

Chavisa Woods is the author of Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country and Other Stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jun 05, 201738 min

First Draft - Jesse Goolsby

Jesse Goolsby is the author of the novel I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them, winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the Flaherty-Duncan First Novel Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared widely, including The Literary Review, EPOCH, The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Salon, and Pleiades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

May 29, 201732 min

First Draft - Max Winter

Max Winter is a graduate of UC Irvine’s MFA program, and a recipient of two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Fiction. He has been published in Day One and Diner Journal. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

May 22, 201736 min

First Draft - Peter Heller

Peter Heller is the author of the novels The Dog Stars, The Painter, and Celine. He is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

May 15, 201736 min

First Draft - Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. ...

May 08, 201739 min

First Draft - Sarah Gerard

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, PlatteForum, and Ucross. She writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and teaches...

May 01, 201736 min

First Draft - Shulem Deen

Shulem Deen is the author of the award-winning memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, an account of growing up in and then leaving the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. He is a regular contributor to Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apr 24, 201732 min

First Draft - Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her latest novel is called We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apr 17, 201732 min

First Draft - Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard is an American novelist and short story writer, who teaches creative writing and film at Williams College. His latest novel is The Book of Aron. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apr 10, 201733 min

First Draft - Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston is a novelist, journalist, and essayist. Preston's most recent nonfiction book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, published in January 2017, tells the true story of the discovery of an ancient, Pre-Columbian city in an unexplored valley deep in the Mosquitia Mountains of Honduras. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apr 03, 201741 min

First Draft - Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart and the essay collection, Abandon Me. Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Glamour, Guernica, Post Road, Salon, The New York Times, Hunger Mountain, Portland Review, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, Bitch Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Drunken Boat, and Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Lea...

Mar 27, 201736 min

First Draft - Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon’s most recent book is Ill Will, a novel. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of ...

Mar 20, 201734 min

First Draft - Deborah Willis

Deborah Willis was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of the the Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2009, and was nominated for the Governor General's Award. Her latest book is The Dark and Other Love Stories. She was a bookseller at Munro's Books in Victoria, BC, a writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, BC, and the 2012-2013 Calgary Distinguished Writers Program writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary. Learn more a...

Mar 13, 201738 min

First Draft - Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist living in New York City. She is the author of Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and is a regular contributor to Frieze. Her most recent novel is A Separation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mar 06, 201737 min

First Draft - Lily King

Lily King is the author of Euphoria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feb 27, 201733 min

First Draft - Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso is the author of seven books including 300 Arguments, a genre-defying work of nonfiction; Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship and suicide; The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease, and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, a collection of very short stories. She is also the author of the poetry collections Siste Viatorand The Captain Lands in Paradise, poems from which have won a P...

Feb 20, 201740 min

First Draft - Anuk Arudpragasam

Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and graduated with a BA from Stanford University in 2010. His first novel is called The Story of a Brief Marriage. He is also working on his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University about the theorization and idealization of the individual in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feb 13, 201738 min

First Draft - Marcy Dermansky

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels The Red Car, Bad Marie and Twins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 30, 201731 min

First Draft - Melanie Finn

Melanie Finn was born in Kenya in 1964. She spent her childhood largely unsupervised, roaming suburban Nairobi’s remnant woodlands and back roads. When she was 11, she moved to Connecticut with her mother and stepfather, and later attended New York University, graduating with a BA in journalism. She is the author of the novels Away From You and The Gloaming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 25, 201737 min

First Draft - Joshua Mohr

Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir "Sirens", as well as five novels including "Damascus", which The New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He’s also written "Fight Song" and "Some Things that Meant the World to Me," one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as "Termite Parade," an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel "All This Life" won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial. Learn more about y...

Jan 16, 201740 min

First Draft - Peter Orner

Peter Orner is the author of Am I Alone Here? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 10, 201735 min

First Draft - Gerrard Conley

First Draft interview with Gerrard Conley, author of the memoir Boy Erased. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jan 02, 201736 min

First Draft - Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma is an Indian-American author and professor of creative writing. His first published novel An Obedient Father won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His second, Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 26, 201633 min

First Draft - Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, the most recent among them The Dead Lands, a post apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga. He is also the author of Red Moon and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk and the craft book Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dec 19, 201641 min

First Draft - Anuradha Roy

Anuradha Roy's latest book, Sleeping on Jupiter, won the DSC Prize for Fiction 2016 and was nominated for the Man Booker prize 2015. She won the Economist Crossword Prize for her second novel, The Folded Earth. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was picked as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Seattle Times. It has been named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India and was shortlist...

Dec 12, 201637 min

First Draft - Randa Jarrar

Randa Jarrar’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and others. Her first novel, A Map of Home was published in half a dozen languages & won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes and Noble Review. Her new book is called Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the L...

Dec 05, 201635 min

First Draft - Emily Witt

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, was published in 2016 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nov 28, 201637 min
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android