Melissa Hafting is an ecologist, bird guide, author, and photographer. She founded the British Columbia Young Birders Program in 2014, which aims to bring together youth of all races, sexual orientations, and genders to look at birds on fun excursions in the natural world. The program also helps teach youth about citizen science and the importance of bird conservation. She is the author of Dare to Bird: Exploring the Joy and Healing Power of Birds, out last year from Rocky Mountain Books. Listen...
Jun 27, 2025•21 min
Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the 2019 memoir, The World According to Fannie Davis, which was a New York Times editor’s choice, and a BuzzFeed, Parade and Kirkus best book of 2019. She is also the writer/director of the award-winning film Naked Acts, rediscovered and re-released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. The author of two novels, she just published a new memoir, Love, ...
Jun 13, 2025•28 min
Shannon Downey, also known as Baddass Cross Stitch, is an artist, activist, craftivist, community builder, and general instigator. Her work inspires others to take action, think, discuss, engage with democracy and their community, and find some digital/analog balance. Her award-winning work can be found in galleries, museums, and private collections around the world and has been featured in outlets including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Atlas Obscura, Fast Company, and i-D, and books including Notori...
May 30, 2025•31 min
Writer and author Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. His new book is Beartooth, jus...
May 16, 2025•24 min
Jessica Gutierrez is a former journalist who has earned several awards for her work and is the current author of A Product of Genetics and Day Drinking: A Never Coming of Age Story, just published by Tiny Reparations House, a division of Penguin Random House. Listen in as she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss writing memoir, and specifically how to identify oneself in the world in order to write from there. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-S...
May 02, 2025•27 min
While Joan Wickersham is best known for her astonishing book, The Suicide Index , a National Book Award finalist, her work over her many years as a professional journalist, writer and tuhor, has taken her nearly everywhere, including to Stockholm to witness a mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay underwater for more than three hundred years until it was rediscovered, raised and housed in a museum built to show it t...
Apr 11, 2025•30 min
Gloria L. Huang is a freelance writer whose fiction has appeared in literary journals including Michigan Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Southern Humanities Review, Fiction Magazine, North American Review, Arts & Letters, Washington Square Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Sycamore Review, and The Antigonish Review. Her debut novel, KAYA OF THE OCEAN has been selected as a Junior Library G...
Mar 28, 2025•25 min
Today my guest is author Nicole Graev Lipson, whose work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other venues. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays anthology. She is the author of the just-out memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters , published by Chronicle Books. Listen in as we talk about the fin...
Mar 14, 2025•31 min
The author Brooke Randel has just published a memoir titled Also Here: Love, Literacy and the Legacy of the Holocaust, in which she explores the third generations's efforts to understand the Holocaust. In Also Here, she captures one woman's harrowing survival and another's struggle to excavate the story from her grandmother's fading memories so we can continue to explore this global horror. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text fo...
Mar 07, 2025•26 min
In the summer of 1964, the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance. Shortly after this awful discovery, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived as a volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project. He was one of more than seven hundred volunteers from the North who assisted Black civil rights activists and clergy to challenge white supremacy in the nation’s most segregated state. Fr...
Feb 21, 2025•28 min
Today my guest is writer, author and actor, Amy Wilson. She is the author of the memoir, When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I'd Never Be, as well as the co-host of the popular parenting podcast WHAT FRESH HELL: LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF MOTHERHOOD. The author of the MOTHER LOAD, a one-woman show which toured to 16 cities after its hit off-Broadway run, she has appeared as an actor on Broadway and as a series regular on...
Feb 07, 2025•30 min
Anita Felicelli's short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She has contributed essays and criticism to the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times Modern Love column, among other places. Her short stories and poems have been anthologized and in 2023, one of her short stories was performed as part of Symphony Space’s Sel...
Jan 24, 2025•29 min
Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer, librettist and memoirist whose new memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart , is just out from Harper Collins. Listen in as host Marion Roach Smith asks the author about the vulnerability needed to write memoir, how to find the language for defining ourselves and writing about family mental illness. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life . Read it, and begin your own journey to writing w...
Jan 10, 2025•26 min
Liz Morrow is a ghost writer and collaborator for thought leaders and and industry experts. With Ariel Curry, she runs Hungry Authors, which coaches authors to publish their books. They have co-authored the new book, Hungry Authors, The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing and Publishing a Nonfiction Book , just out from Rowman and Littlefield. Listen in while host Marion Roach Smith interviews Liz Morrow on what authors need to know to write and publish nonfiction books. The QWERTY podcast ...
Dec 27, 2024•25 min
Comics artist and writer, Teresa Wong is the author of the 2019 graphic memoir Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression , a finalist for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2020. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. Her new book, All Our Ordinary Stories , is just out from Arsenal Pulp Press. Listen in as she and I discuss the intimacy that the graphic memoir allows. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you ...
Dec 13, 2024•28 min
Sarah Sherbill's memoir, There was Night and There was Morning: A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption , is just out from Union Sq. and Co., and chronicles a road to redemption after her father, a beloved rabbi in an Orthodox Chicago community is also a man who abuses his family. In Sarah's role in the family, she is the secret keeper, until a secret so grave is revealed that creates the demand to write it all down. Her work, including a remarkable full-page opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times...
Nov 29, 2024•26 min
Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and author of the graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), and the author of the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess (2019). Sarah is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012. Her new book, a graphic memoir, is just out from Arsenal Press. The book is title...
Nov 15, 2024•33 min
Brigit Binns is a prolific author of cookbooks, with more than 100,000 copies in print, including eleven titles she has authored for Williams Sonoma. She has also co-authored cookbooks, edited cookbooks and written 90 shows for the Food Network series, The Hot Tamales. And now she has turned her attention to memoir. Her new book is titled Rottenkid: A Succulent Story of Survival , just out from Sibylline Press. In this fine memoir, she covers food, Hollywood, neglect, celebrity, infidelity, cook...
Sep 20, 2024•24 min
Caro De Robertis, whose pronouns are they/theirs, is a Uruguayan-American author and full tenured professor in the creative writing dept at San Francisco State University. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope . Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Their new book is The P...
Sep 06, 2024•25 min
Writer and novelist Juli Min is the editor-in-chief and fiction editor of the Shanghai Literary Review . Currently a resident of Shanghai, she was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in New Jersey, and has just published her debut novel. Entitled Shanghailanders, the book is just out from Spiegel and Grau. Listen in as she and I discuss book structure, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life . R...
Aug 23, 2024•28 min
Deborah Paredez is the author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke 2009) and the poetry collections, This Side of Skin (Wings Press 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA 2020). Her poetry, essays, and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and is ...
Aug 09, 2024•29 min
Rusty Gear is an Americana recording artist whose work explores the story of the USA and for whom the Qwerty Podcast host, Marion Roach Smith, writes lyrics. In this episode, they explore working together as creatives. What is the nature of good artistic collaboration? How do two writers work together? Listen in as we explore those themes and much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and beg...
Jul 12, 2024•28 min
Margaret Juhae Lee has been been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares Blog. She received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of research for her recently published book, book, Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History , published by Melville House. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly No...
Jun 28, 2024•27 min
Lissa Soep knows how to reanimate the voices of the dead, and she is here to teach you how to get those voices into your memoir writing. She is a senior editor for audio at Vox Media and special projects producer and senior scholar-in-residence at YR Media. She has a PhD from Stanford, where she studied education, social theory, and linguistic anthropology with leading Bakhtin scholars. She lives in San Francisco. Lissa has co-led teams honored with Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, IRE, Gracie and othe...
Jun 14, 2024•31 min
Storyteller, actor and award-winning author, Alicia D. Williams is on The Qwerty Podcast to talk about her new book, Mid Air, illustrated by Danica Novgorodoff and just published by Atheneum. Her book, Genesis Begins Again received the Newberry and Kirkus Prize honors, and was a William C. Morris Award finalist and won the Coretta Scott King- John Steptoe Award for New Talent. She is also the author of the picture books, Jump at the Sun and The Talk . The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the ...
May 31, 2024•30 min
Michael Jamin is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter who has been writing for television since 1996, and whose credits include Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill, Beavis & Butthead, Wilfred, Out of Practice, and Rules of Engagement. He’s also served as Executive Producer/Showrunner on Glenn Martin DDS, Maron, and Rhett & Link’s Buddy System. If you are interested in how to write book-length memoir in essays, his new book will show you how, one essay at a time. It's called, A Paper Orchestra, and...
May 17, 2024•29 min
Janet Skeslien Charles is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose work has been translated into 37 languages. Her shorter work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Sydney Morning Herald , and Montana Noir . Her 2021 novel, The Paris Library , became an instant New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today bestseller upon release. Originally from Montana, she lives in Paris and has just released Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade , published by Atria. Listen in and read along as w...
May 03, 2024•27 min
Hal Schrieve is the author of the 2019 book, Out of Salem , selected for the National Book Award Long List for Young People’s Literature. Hal works as a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library. As a librarian, Hal has written educator guides to other queer books for children and teens. Hal has had poetry in Vetch magazine, and is featured in Stacked Deck Press’s 2018 trans comics anthology We’re Still Here. Hal writes queer fiction for young people and writes comics and zines. Hal’s ...
Apr 19, 2024•28 min
Suzette Mullen is the author of the new memoir, The Only Way Through is Out , just out from the University of Wisconsin Press. She is the founder of Your Story Finder, where she provides nonfiction book coaching. In 2021, she published a Tiny Love Story in The New York Times that was the seed that became her new book. Listen as she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss how to go from a short piece of memoir to a book, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Pr...
Apr 05, 2024•30 min
Author, historian, essayist, bestselling novelist and commentator Kevin Baker has just published part one of his long-awaited two-part look into baseball and the city that formed it and was formed by it. Called The New York Game: Baseball and The Rise of a New City (Knopf, 2024), this was a labor of love from a super fan of both the city and the game. In our interview on the Qwerty podcast, we discuss the sport, the city and how a historian does his work. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by ...
Mar 22, 2024•30 min
