Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon: Recent Episodes
Francesca Rheannon
Writers Voice—in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004 and podcasting since 2006. Each week brings an hour of interviews with authors, both high profile and emerging: novelists, journalists, scientists, memoirists, poets, filmmakers, historians and more. Francesca Rheannon is producer and host of Writer's Voice. She is a writer, an independent radio producer and a broadcast journalist.
Read the transcript with hotlinks and headlines here.
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Champions of Democracy: The Populist Movement of the 1890s
Join us as we explore the transformative impact of the Populist movement during the 1890s.
In this episode, we delve into the story of hard-pressed farmers and workers who sparked a movement that reshaped the nation's political landscape. In his book The Forgotten Populists:When Farmers Turned Left to Save Democracy, author Steve Babson reveals the historical roots of progressive change and the relevance of this movement to contemporary struggles against corporate profiteering and right-wing authoritarians.
About The Author
Steve Babson is a labor educator and union activist. He’s published seven books, including Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town; Lean Work: Empowerment and Exploitation in the Global Auto Industry; and The Color of Law: Ernie Goodman and the Struggle for Labor and Civil Rights in Detroit.
The Enduring Legacy of Matthew Shepard
Heather Has Two Mommies author Lesléa Newman reflects on the 25th anniversary of Matt Shepard's murder as a pivotal moment for LGBTQ rights. Despite significant progress over the past quarter century, she notes the frightening backlash from rightwing hate groups threatening these gains.
Newman commemorates Shepard's legacy in her new book, Always Matt, emphasizing his aspiration to, as he said, “create a better, kinder, and more peaceful world for everyone.”
In this episode, we discover who Matthew Shepard was as a person, not just a victim, and why advocating for LGBTQ rights remains so important for all of us.
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We talk with Simon Worrall and Heather Dune-Macadam about the fascinating and tragic story of a young Jewish artist in Nazi-occupied Paris. Their book is STAR CROSSED: A True Romeo and Juliet Story in Hitler’s Paris.
Then, New York Times columnist and author Margaret Renkl tells us about her acclaimed new book THE COMFORT OF CROWS: A Backyard Year.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Paris, 1940
In Nazi-occupied Paris, pursuing art, culture, and jazz becomes an act of defiance for patriotic Parisians. Forbidden love blossoms between Annette Zelman, a spirited Jewish student at the Academy of Beaux-Arts, and the poet Jean Jausion. But escalating restrictions on the Jewish community lead the young lovers down divergent and tragic paths.
Literary couple Heather Dune-Macadam and Simon Worrall used a treasure-trove of personal letters to uncover the story behind Starcrossed. Beyond the lovers at the heart of the tale, they paint a fascinating portrait of wartime Paris and its lively scene of intellectual resistance to Nazi rule.
About the Authors
Heather Dune is the author of the award-winning book, 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz. Simon Worrall is the author of several books, including The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery.
Margaret Renkl’s Backyard Year
The leaves are falling in ever greater numbers as Fall marches into Winter. And as they do, the question arises, what to do with them?
My guest, New York Times columnist and author Margaret Renkl has a simple solution: do nothing. A messy yard is great habitat for our endangered wildlife.
Her new book The Comfort of Crows is a a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. Beautifully written, it reminds us to pay attention to the fragile and wondrous life around us. By protecting it, we enrich our own lives immeasurably.
About the Author
Margaret Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss and Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly.
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We spend the hour with Corban Addison talking about his spell-binding legal thriller, WASTELANDS: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Read the transcript and show notes here
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We talk with poet, farmer and author Scott Chaskey about his new book, Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship In The Web of Life.
Then, Chef Ravinder Bhogalintroduces us to the comfort and joy of immigrant food. Her book is Comfort and Joy: Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen.
For full show notes, go here. For interview transcript, click here.
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We talk with Patrick Chura about a long-suppressed novel about the Holocaust by the blacklisted Socialist writer, Albert Maltz. It’s just been published in the US — over 60 years after it was written. Chura wrote the introduction to A Tale of One January and is responsible for its publication by Bloomsbury Press.
Then, we re-play an extended segment of our 2018 interview with Norman Finkelstein about his book, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom.
A Tale Of One January
Albert Maltz’ novel A Tale of One January tells the story of six prisoners who have just escaped from a forced march out of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Based on a true story told by one of the escapees to the writer, Albert Maltz, the novel paints a compelling portrait of what it’s like to experience sudden freedom after years of horrific confinement and the constant threat of death.
Blacklisted Author, Suppressed Novel
Albert Maltz was a committed socialist who wrote for the stage and screen until he was blacklisted in 1947 as one of the Hollywood Ten. A Tale of One January was published in the UK in 1967, but, due to the blacklist, was never published in the US — until now.
A Historian Revives The Story
Patrick Chura is writing a biography of Albert Maltz and wrote the introduction to A Tale of One January. He is Professor of English at the University of Akron and the author of Thoreau the Land Surveyor and Michael Gold: The People’s Writer.
Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom
The October 7 Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens were utterly horrific.
The Back Story
But they cannot be understood without considering their backstory: 75 years of dispossession of the land Palestinians called home for centuries, 13 years of a siege of Gaza, 90% unemployment for Gazan youth, the occupation of the West Bank, near daily killings of Palestinian civilians, the wanton demolition of Palestinian homes, denial of the right to vote, and increasing attacks by Israeli settlers who daily take more of the land and homes of their Palestinian neighbors.
Those are only some of the reasons Israel has been accused of imposing an apartheid on the Palestinians. Now, the world is watching in horror as Israel carries out the collective punishment of an entire people that threatens ethnic cleansing at best — and genocide at worst.
A Fierce Critic of Israeli Policy
Most of Norman Finkelstein’s ten books have centered on Israeli policy toward the Palestinian people. He has been a fierce critic of that policy, well before others had the courage or even awareness to speak out against it. We spoke with him in 2018 about his book, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom and re-air it now.
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We talk with ecologist Carl Safina about his book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. It’s about how a tiny ragged ball of fluff taught a famed ecologist about a deadly human misconception.
Then, do the endless wars around oil include the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Charlotte Dennett’s book Follow The Pipelines is about the deadly politics of the great game for oil. We talk with her about how those deadly politics are a hidden factor in the West and Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians.
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Carl Safina: A Pandemic Owl
Not long before the Covid 19 epidemic locked our nation down, ecologist and author Carl Safina and his wife Patricia were handed a tiny, raggedy ball of fluff by a wildlife rescuer. It turned out to be a baby owl on the brink of death the rescuer had found lying on the ground.
Carl and Patricia raised the chick they named Alfie. Through the process, Safina learned more than he ever imagined, not only about Alfie the Owl but also about how the world actually works and how people have become so blind to that — at our peril and at the peril of all creation.
Animals Are People (And People Are Animals)
We’ve talked with Safina about his recent books Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild, which is about animal cultures, that show the intelligence and conscious agency that are everywhere in the animal kingdom.
His new book, Alfie and Me, goes further by exploring the friendship between a wild owl and Safina. That relationship leads him to ask why and how we humans adopted the bizarre belief that we are unconnected to the rest of life on the planet. From its origins in Plato’s philosophy, to the French Enlightenment to modern science, it’s a belief that will doom us, sooner or later, to extinction.
About The Author
Carl Safina is the founding president of the Safina Center and is inaugural holder of the Carl Safina Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University.
Charlotte Dennett, Bringing Context to the Israel/Palestine Conflict
What The Western Media Is Missing
Ever since the horrific October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli residents, most of Western media has focussed on backing the Israelis’ right to defend themselves from attacks while downplaying the historical context within which those attacks took place: the 75 year-long dispossession of the Palestinians, the predations of Israeli settlements into Palestinian territory and the sealing off of Gaza as the world’s largest open-air prison, as well as a host of violations of the human rights and dignities of the Palestinian people.
Of course, nothing excuses killing civilians, whether they be Israeli or Palestinian. It does seem like the tide of mainstream opinion may be turning, as Israel’s savage siege and bombardment of Gaza and the resultant deaths of many thousands, including children, wake up even the corporate media to the larger issues surrounding the war.
The Hidden Role of The Fight to Control Oil
But one big factor in the conflict has remained largely hidden: the role oil — and specifically oil off the Gaza coast — plays.
Charlotte Dennett’s 2022 book Follow The Pipelines, is about how the Great Powers’ Game Over Oil underlies so much of the conflict in the Middle East.
It looks beyond ethnic hatreds and divisions -- most notably Arabs versus Jews -- to those who have set peoples against each other in their divide and rule quest to control and profit from the oil that lies under the sand and waters of that region.
We called Dennett up on short notice to ask her about the role the oil is playing in the Israel-Palestinian war.
About The Author
Charlotte Dennett is an attorney, author and investigative journalist.
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Buzzy Jackson tells us the story of the Dutch anti-Nazi saboteur, Hannie Schaft and the lessons it holds for us as we confront fascism today. Her novel based on true events is To Die Beautiful. Then Francesca reads a short excerpt from her own father’s story of resistance in the same war.
And as I was writing the book, it was right around the time when the Trump administration began locking families in cages on the Mexican border and separating parents from their children.
And I was so horrified by this, not only because of the obvious human rights issues, but also because it was so similar to what I was researching in this book about the rise of fascism in Europe and specifically the Nazis. — Buzzy Jackson
Read the transcript
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We talk with Fintan O’Toole about his scathing — and tender — personal history of modern Ireland, We Don’t Know Ourselves. Then we hear Seamus Heaney reading a poem and a rare recording of storyteller Susan Porter reading from the Irish legend of Cuchulain.
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A Personal History of Modern IrelandAs a journalist and critic for the Irish Times since 1988, Fintan O’Toole has had a front row seat on Ireland’s cultural, political and economic transformation from European backwater to center of global business.
His bestselling book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History Of Modern Ireland, is unsparing in its critique of those who ruled the country. But it’s a critique founded on a profound love for his long-beleaguered compatriots. And O’Toole draws a cautionary lesson for us here in the US, as the lines separating Church and State become ever more eroded.
The Irish TheocracyWhen Fintan O’Toole was born in 1958, Ireland was perhaps the poorest country in Europe. Most of its people scrabbled out a meagre living on the land. The country’s main export, aside from cattle, was its own youth; facing bleak prospects at home, young people fled abroad to England, America and elsewhere in droves.
“Religion and politics are pretty important things in and of themselves, but when you fuse them into a single identity, it actually becomes pretty toxic.” — Fintan O’Toole
Ireland was also in the grip of what can only be described as a theocracy. The Catholic Church ruled over the most intimate aspects of people’s lives: the family, reproduction, sexuality, education and healthcare. Anything that violated the strict dictates of the Church was severely punished — except, of course, for the pedophilia rampant among the priesthood, which was ignored. Corruption reigned in both Church and State.
The Irish TigerNow Ireland is a global center for the technology and pharmaceutical industries. Abortion and gay marriage are legal. The gender apartheid that reigned of old has been overturned. Much has changed, although the Irish Tiger’s neoliberalism hasn’t put an end to corruption—it’s just altered the playing fields.
About The AuthorFintan O’Toole is a columnist for the Irish Times and teaches at Princeton University. He was drama critic for the New York Daily News, as well as the Irish Times, and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.
A New York Times Bestseller, We Don’t Know Ourselves was named among the 10 best books of 2022. It’s now out in paperback from W.W. Norton.
Seamus Heaney’s Poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”
Susan Porter, the Story of Cuchulain
During the 1960s hippie heyday of Big Sur, California, the storyteller Susan Porter recorded an album of Stories from Irish Mythology. Francesca’s father, Guido Teunissen, lived on Porter’s property in a house on a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She has in her possession a cassette tape of Porter’s album, sent to her by her father. We hear a clip from the story of Cuchulain, read by Porter. The audio quality is faded — but that only adds to it air of mystery.
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We talk with Elsa Sjunneson about disability rights. Then Kathryn Nicolai tells us about how to train our brains to sleep.
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James Vincent talks about his book Beyond Measure: The Hidden History Of Measurement From Cubits To Quantum Constants. And Simon Winchester discusses his book, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.
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Devra Lehmann tells us about Socrates: A Life Worth Living. And Dr. Seema Yasmin about her guide to disinformation, What the fact: Finding The Truth In All The Noise.
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We talk with two emerging feminist novelists from the African continent, Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi and NoViolet Bulaweyo.
The post Omolola Ogunyemi, JOLLOF RICE AND OTHER REVOLUTIONS & Noviolet Bulaweyo, GLORY appeared first on Writer's Voice.
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Douglas Rushkoff discusses his book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Tyson Yunkaporta talks about Indigenous thinking. His book is Sand Talk.
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We hear about a small town on the Texas coast set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster— and the woman who fought to save it.
The post Kirk Wallace Johnson, THE FISHERMAN AND THE DRAGON & Diane Wilson, AN UNREASONABLE WOMAN appeared first on Writer's Voice.
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Laura Kaplan tells us about the legendary abortion service Jane and Helen Shiller talks about organizing for social justice.
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Philip Schultz talks about his book Comforts of the Abyss & investigative journalist Carey Gillam discusses the link between paraquat and Parkinsons.
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Emi Nietfield talks about her powerful memoir, Acceptance. And we re-play our 2017 conversation with Magpie Murders author Anthony Horowitz as PBS Mystery airs the his TV adaptation.
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We talk with theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla about FANTASTIC NUMBERS. And we replay our 2009 interview with poet Richard Wilbur.
The post Antonio Padilla, FANTASTIC NUMBERS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM & Poet Richard Wilbur (Encore) appeared first on Writer's Voice.
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Steve Hendricks talks about fasting. His book is The Oldest Cure in the World. Then, Millie Kerr discusses Wilder. It's about rewilding efforts around the world.
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We talk with Marianne Williamson about her book, A Politics of Love. Then Rabbi Michael Lerner tells us about his book, Revolutionary Love.
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Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah talks about his novel Afterlives. R.F. Kuang tells us about her fantasy/slash/alternate history novel, Babel.
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We talk with Octavio Solis about his short story collection about the southern border, Retablos. And Freya Sampson tells us about her novel The Lost Ticket.
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Bill McKibben talks about his new book, The Flag, The Cross And The Station Wagon. And Sarah Thankam Mathews tells us about her debut novel, All This Could Be Different.
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Dolen Perkins Valdez talks about her novel Take My Hand. Also, rebroadcast of interview with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers about The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.
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Keri Blakinger talks about her powerful prison memoir, Corrections In Ink. Then, Eve Karlin tells us about her historical novel Track 61.
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Mohsin Hamid tells us about his novel The Last White Man & Omar El Akkad on his novel What Strange Paradise.
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Bruce Holsinger tells us about his novel, The Displacements. Then, moral philosopher Elizabeth Cripps talks about her book, What Climate Justice Means and Why We Should Care.
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We talk to Mary Pipher about A Life In Light: Meditations On Impermanence. And Anita Barros talks with us about her novel, The Language of Birds.
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This is a special edition of Writer’s Voice produced on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Many questions about the terror attacks remain unanswered for the families of the 9/11 victims. They remain unanswered for many other Americans, as well.
We talk with Ray McGinnis about his book, UNANSWERED QUESTIONS: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored
Why did WTC Building 7 collapse some eight hours after the North and South Towers, despite being a block and a half away and untouched by either of the planes that took the Towers down?
Why did NORAD, charged with keeping America’s skies safe from attack, fail to bring even one of the hijacked planes down — an unprecedented failure for an agency that incessantly practiced just such maneuvers?
Why did the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund specify that the victims’ relatives would lose their benefits if they tried to sue any of the alleged Saudi funders of terrorism related to the attacks? That was just one of the ways that the focus was taken off the Saudi attackers and misplaced onto Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with the attacks.
All these questions and many more are explored in Ray McGinnis’ book, ‘UNANSWERED QUESTIONS: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored.
It’s a detailed account of the FSC, the Family Steering Committee for the Independent 9/11 Commission: the stories of the families, why they created the Commission, what they wanted to know, and how they were stonewalled and stymied in their efforts to get an accounting of the truth.
Kristen Breitweiser, one of the FSC members said “We are going to get to the bottom of this and we are going to make sure someone is held responsible so that nobody else ever had to walk in our shoes.”
Ray McGinnis’ book is a sober, even-handed, meticulous exploration of the questions still outstanding after 20 years.
Shakespeare on the brain! We talk with Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz about her adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for modern audiences.
Then, Michael Blanding tells the fascinating story of an amateur scholar who has built a compelling and controversial case about the source of Shakespeare’s work. The book is North By Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest For The Truth Behind The Bard’s Work.
Migdalia Cruz
In Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth, the Witches run the world. The Macbeths live out a dark cautionary tale of love, greed, and power, falling from glory into calamity as the Witches spin their fate.
Translating Shakespeare’s language for a modern audience, Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz rewrites Macbeth with all the passion of the Bronx.
This translation of Macbeth was presented in 2018 as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse.
Migdalia Cruz is the author of 63 plays, operas, screenplays, and musicals — and five Translations, of which Macbeth is one.
Michael Blanding
Controversies over whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays attributed to him have arisen literally over the centuries. That’s because many have questioned how this glover’s son from the backwater of Stratford-on-Avon could have written plays with so much knowledge of court politics, foreign lands and international intrigue.
Alternate authors like the Earl of Oxford have been passionately put forward and just as passionately rebuffed.
But what if Shakespeare’s authorship is real, but the source for his plays lies with someone who was in a position to have the erudite knowledge evidenced in the plays—another playwright whose plays Shakespeare reworked in his own genius of language?
That’s the thesis of Michael Blanding’s new book about the renegade scholar proposing that theory, North By Shakespeare. Blanding employs all his skills as an investigative reporter to put the evidence before the reader. He also takes readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England as well as the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives.
Michael Blanding is an investigative journalist and best-selling author of The Map Thief. North By Shakespeare is the winner of the 2021 International Book Award in Narrative Non-Fiction.
We talk with Julia Sweig about her acclaimed book, Lady Bird Johnson: In Plain Sight.
Then, after exiting Afghanistan, President Biden is turning his attention to China, implying that China is a serious security threat that the US may have to meet with force. But security analyst Michael Klare disagrees. We talk with him about his recent post in the Nation magazine, The Real Existential Threat Is Our Overheating Planet.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004. Like us on Facebook at Writers Voice Radio, on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast or find us on Twitter @WritersVoice. Love Writer’s Voice? Please rate us on your podcast app. It really helps to get the word out about our show. Julia Sweig
When the assassination of JFK catapulted Lyndon Baines Johnson into the White House, few among the public knew much about the new president—and even less about the new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. LBJ had to try to heal a grieving nation. He was confronted with the great defining issues of that time (and ours): civil rights, income inequality and military conflict abroad. The person he most leaned on for advice and support was his wife.
Lady Bird chronicled her time in the White House in an extraordinary set of notebooks and tape recordings that reveal her centrality to the Johnson Administration.
As Julia Sweig reveals in her book based on that chronicle, Lady Bird Johnson: In Plain Sight, the First Lady was deeply insightful and profoundly engaged with the issues of the day.
Her Highway Beautification program, for example, tackled the issue of environmental racism way before environmental racism was even a term. Yet as protests against the Vietnam War exploded across the nation, this brilliant woman found herself increasingly out of touch.
In addition to her brilliant and fascinating book, Sweig has also produced a spellbinding podcast on the same topic, using Lady Bird Johnson’s own tape recordings.
Julia Sweig is a New York Times bestselling author, scholar and entrepreneur. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Nation and other venues. She is a senior research fellow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight is her fourth book.
Read An Excerpt from Sweig’s Book
We talk with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, award-winning poet and now novelist, about The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, just out from Harper Collins.
Then, two young women build a literary empire around poetry and life lessons. We talk with Jade Dee and Wilnona Marie, the And I Thought Ladies.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois is already racking up the kudos—and it’s only been out since August 24.
Oprah picked it for her Book Club, the New York Times reviewer called it “quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time,” and it’s up for numerous awards.
So what’s it all about? The great writer Jacqueline Woodson—a former Writer’s Voice guest—describes it:
“This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain… and so much more. In Jeffers’ deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel.”
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is about a family through the centuries and also about one young descendant living in the contemporary world, discovering her family’s story.
The author of five acclaimed books of poetry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers brings her poetic lyricism to her prose in this, her debut novel. Jeffers is Professor of English at University of Oklahoma in Norman.
Jade Dee and Wilnona Marie, The And I Thought Ladies
Francesca met Jade Dee and Wilnona Marie, The And I Thought Ladies, when they invited her onto their podcast.
She Googled their work and found it includes a series of poetry books self-described as “literary life guides with w/ pop poetry,” called the And I Thought series, a “Miss-Fit Guide”, at least one podcast, at least two magazines, a store, a literary festival and more.
They are a dynamic duo, but, more than that, they are two very thoughtful and energetic women who seek to make a difference in people’s lives with poetry.
The And I Thought Ladies on Facebook
Next week on Writer’s Voice,we talk with Julia Sweig about her acclaimed book about the White House years of Lady Bird Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. Don’t miss it!