Writer Sarah Gailey returns to the show for a discussion about their new novella, Have You Eaten? This serialized story follows four young queer characters as they traverse an America in the process of collapse, taking care of each other along the way. In our conversation, Sarah and I talked about experimentation in fiction, vine-ripened tomatoes, …

In the opening poem of Rachel Edelman’s debut collection, Dear Memphis, the speaker returns to their home city after a long time away, traversing a landscape that is both familiar and foreign, a place to which she belongs but also doesn’t. Over the course of the collection, Edelman asks questions about heritage and inheritance; about exile, diaspor…

Writer, editor, and podcaster Jennifer Baker’s debut YA novel, Forgive Me Not, imagines a near-future America in which the juvenile criminal justice system has been “reformed” to allow young people to undergo grueling Trials instead of incarceration. It’s an incisive and powerful story about carceral justice, as well as a moving coming-of-age and f…

Writer Rachel Lyon returns to the show to discuss her latest novel, Fruit of the Dead, a contemporary retelling of the Persephone myth in which a young woman is seduced by wealth and privilege in a story about addiction, class, sexual assault, and power. In our conversation, we talked about how malleable identity can be during adolescence and how t…

Introducing Hey, It's Me! I'm happy to announce a new podcast from me and my friend Rachel Zucker, Hey, It's Me! Here's the first episode as a bonus for KTCO listeners. Enjoy! Subscribe: Apple Podcasts Pocket Casts Overcast RSS WebBy Rachel Zucker & Mike Sakasegawa

For this KTCO Book Club conversation, poet Amorak Huey joins me to discuss Layli Long Soldier’s 2017 poetry collection, Whereas. In our conversation, we talked about the way the poems confront language, what language means in the context of forced assimilation, and how the poems engage with both history and contemporary reality. (Recorded March 26,…

For this KTCO Book Club conversation, I’m joined by writer and group facilitator Martha Crawford for a discussion about Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s 2023 memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. In our conversation, Martha and I talked about different ways of knowing, how to read across cultures without being extractive, storytelling as healing, and what…

Writer and friend José Pablo Iriarte returns to the show to discuss their debut middle-grade novel, Benny Ramirez and the Nearly Departed. In our conversation, we talked about building stories without antagonists, writing for young readers, and what makes coming-of-age stories such an enduring phenomenon. Then for the second segment, we talked abou…

Sarah Rose Etter is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. In Sarah’s latest novel, Ripe, a young woman is trapped in a dream-job-turned-corporate-nightmare at a cutthroat Silicon Valley tech startup. Her bosses are capricious and cruel, the city she lives in is crumbling under late capitalism, and everywhere she goes she is followed by her own persona…

For this KTCO “Book” Club conversation, writer Maggie Tokuda-Hall returns to the show to talk about the game Baldur’s Gate 3. In our conversation, Maggie and I talked about what it’s like to experience a story with so many branching paths, how player choices reflect the player’s personality, as well as some standout storytelling moments from the ga…

Olatunde Osinaike is a poet based in Atlanta, GA. In his debut full-length poetry collection, Tender Headed, Olatunde explores Black masculinity, both celebrating and interrogating it in his sonically virtuosic poems. We talked about his approach to poetry, what poetic lineage means to him, and the silences inherent in patriarchy. Then for the seco…

For this KTCO Book Club conversation, poet and podcaster Rachel Zucker returns to the show to discuss Eugenia Leigh’s poetry collection Bianca. In our conversation, we talked about our approaches to talking about books with their authors, how form shapes how we take in intense subject matter in a poem, and how a book can be a means of connection. S…

Gerardo Sámano Córdova is a writer and artist from Mexico City. In his debut novel, Monstrilio, Gerardo draws from both horror and literary fiction traditions to tell a story about grief, family, and self-acceptance. In our conversation, Gerardo and I talked about genre expectations, genre fiction as a site of art, and what it means to be monstrous…

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a writer based in the Bronx, NY. In his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana presents us with a dystopian future America where convicted prisoners fight each other to the death in a televised bloodsport. The book is both a blistering critique of the US carceral system and an insistence on the inalienable humanity of e…

Rachel Zucker is a writer, podcast, and teacher based in New York and Maine. Her latest book, The Poetics of Wrongness, is a collection of essays (originally written and performed for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series) delving into her own poetics, motherhood, the history of confessional poetry, and the ethics of “say everything” poetry. In our conv…

For our latest KTCO Book Club episode, writer Sarah Gailey joins us for a discussion of H. A. Clarke’s YA novels The Scapegracers and The Scratch Daughters. In our conversation, Sarah and I talked about the ways Clarke’s novels subvert genre expectations, about the quality of teen girls’ rage, and about why these books are “capital-I Important.” Su…

Dayna Patterson is a poet, photographer, and textile artist based in the Pacific Northwest. The poems in her latest collection, O Lady, Speak Again, use the voices of the women characters from Shakespeare’s plays to talk about patriarchy, motherhood, sexuality, religion, heritage. In our conversation, Dayna and I discussed her creative process and …

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator based in Houston, TX. The poems in Joshua’s debut collection, Grace Engine, ask what grace means in a hostile world of lynchings, mental illness, self-hate, and suicide. These poems offer no solace, yet nevertheless reach toward beauty and peace. In our conversation, Joshua and I talked about what a grace engine…

For our latest KTCO Book Club episode, media critic Mel Thomas joins us for a conversation about Holly Black’s YA fantasy novel The Cruel Prince. In our conversation, we discuss the ways that craft in YA fiction is often dismissed or overlooked by both critics and readers, the dynamics of abuse and trauma in the novel, and being able to enjoy art o…

Gabrielle Bates is a poet based in Seattle, WA. Throughout Gabrielle’s debut collection, Judas Goat, there is a feeling of quiet, that the poems are almost being whispered to you. And yet it is not a soft or comforting quiet that these poems bring, but rather one that often contains a sense of menace. In our conversation, Gabrielle and I talked abo…

Abby Minor is a writer based in central Pennsylvania. In her debut book of poems, As I Said: A Dissent, Abby combines the historical narrative of Ann Lohman—a 19th-century abortion provider in New York City—with personal and family history, creating a collection of poems that challenge the typical notion of an abortion story. In our conversation, A…

Molly Spencer is a poet based in Michigan. The poems in her collections In the House and Hinge engage with chronic illness, divorce, domesticity, motherhood, and the ways that our lives don’t always work out the way we expected them to. In our conversation, we talked about dissolution, the uses of poetry, ways of knowing, and speaking unlovely trut…

Luther Hughes is a poet based in Seattle, WA. The poems in Luther’s debut collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, are tender, erotic, vulnerable, erudite, at times dark, and at times ecstatic. In our conversation, we talked about power dynamics in sexual encounters, different forms of love, and writing as a way of understanding oneself. Then in the sec…

André Ramos-Woodard is a photographic artist originally from Texas and Tennessee. In their series BLACK SNAFU, André combines photographs celebrating Blackness with appropriated illustrations from racist cartoons as a way of confronting the history and present reality of American racism. In our conversation we discussed appropriation, questions of …

Amanda Marchand is a Canadian, New York-based photographer. Amanda’s Lumen Notebook series is a body of elegant and strikingly beautiful images that nevertheless layer deep meaning within their seemingly simple compositions. In our conversation, Amanda and I talked about her process in creating these photograms and how working within strict constra…

Fatemeh Baigmoradi is a photographic artist originally from Iran. In her series It’s Hard to Kill, Fatemeh works with archival family photos from Iran, using fire to obscure or destroy portions of the image—connecting to the way that her own family and many others burned their photos after the Iranian Revolution to protect themselves or others in t…

Sarah Hollowell is a writer based in Indiana. Sarah’s debut novel, A Dark and Starless Forest, is a YA contemporary fantasy story centered on a family of foster sisters learning about their magic, until suddenly they start disappearing. In our conversation we talked about the difference in process between short stories and novels, how her novel por…

Ayesha Raees is a poet and hybrid artist based in New York, Miami, and Lahore. In her debut book of poetry, Coining a Wishing Tower, she explores death, grief, culture, religion, separation, and return in a hybrid form that is part poetry, part narrative, part fable, and entirely remarkable. In our conversation, we talked about her book, her writin…

Anahid Nersessian is a professor and critic based in Los Angeles, CA. In her latest book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid takes the reader through close readings of John Keats’s six Great Odes, providing cultural context and explicating their themes of sexual violence, melancholy, and the seductiveness of beauty. More than that, though, t…

For this installment of the KTCO Book Club, writer and podcaster Maggie Tokuda-Hall joins us to discuss Susanna Clark’s 2020 novel Piranesi. A relatively slim volume, Piranesi is surprisingly difficult to summarize but, like its labyrinthine setting, with patience and attention the book will reveal its profound beauty and kindness. (Conversation re…

There’s a way in which the end of a serious relationship can shake your entire concept of yourself, and through your grief you have to find yourself again. Yanyi’s latest book of poems, Dream of the Divided Field, braids poems about heartbreak and implied emotional violence with poems about transition and immigration. Each has a similar but distinc…

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is a writer based in London, UK. Rowan’s second novel, Starling Days, is a beautiful story about the complex love between the book’s two protagonists, Mina and Oscar, and their respective challenges in the wake of Mina’s suicide attempt. Starling Days explores family and love in many forms, and how people both connect and sepa…

Farrah Karapetian is an artist based in California. Known for her large-scale photograms, Farrah’s wide-ranging practice incorporates sculpture, performance, and different forms of mark-making to stretch the photographic medium as she is driven by her intense and rigorous curiosity. In our conversation, Farrah and I talked about the appeal of the p…

Tucson-based photographer Ken Rosenthal's work has always stuck in my mind for both its striking visual style and the way that he uses images to represent and explore his internal emotional and psychological state. Whether he's looking at landscapes or family members or familiar objects, his photographs resonate because they represent the personal.…

For this installment of the KTCO Book Club, poet and podcaster Gabrielle Bates joins me for a conversation about Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s 1994 poetry collection Song. In our conversation, Gabrielle and I talked about how Kelly builds the worlds of her poems, how the poems layer metaphor, and how the poems manage to be simultaneously (and paradoxically…

Kary Wayson is a poet based in Seattle, WA. The poems Kary’s latest collection, The Slip, are wonderfully slippery in both form and feeling, in a way that demands attention and rewards deep engagement. In our conversation we discussed what a poem can do, how we approach “meaning” in poetry, and how life changes affect our art. Then in the second se…

My friend Paula Riff passed away recently, after having been ill with cancer for two years. Paula was a wonderful, kind, generous, and enthusiastic person, and a brilliant artist whose work pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to talk with her about that work for the show. In our conversation, P…

For this installment of the KTCO Book Club, writer Wm Henry Morris joins me for a conversation about Sofia Samatar’s 2017 story collection Tender. The stories in this collection range from fairy tale and folklore to dystopian sci-fi to (almost) contemporary realism, but all have in common Samatar’s impeccable prose, attention to detail, and excepti…

Kazim Ali is a writer based in San Diego, CA. Kazim’s latest poetry collection, The Voice of Sheila Chandra, uses sound to explode meaning and explore silence and voicelessness, bringing together history, philosophy, spirituality, and personal experience to create something truly profound. In our conversation, Kazim and I discussed the divine in ar…

Rizzhel Mae Javier is a photographer and installation artist based in San Diego, CA. I first met Rizzhel when we were both participating in the portfolio reviews at the Medium Festival a few years ago, and her stop-motion, flipbook-style pieces immediately caught my attention. More recently, Rizzhel was named one of the 2017 emerging artists by the…

José Olivarez is a poet living and working in Chicago, Illinois, and is also co-host of one of my all-time favorite podcasts, The Poetry Gods. In our wide-ranging conversation we talked about how The Poetry Gods came to be, toxic masculinity in the poetry world, and how discovering poetry allowed José to find his artistic voice. In the second segme…

Esmé Weijun Wang's debut novel The Border of Paradise was one of my favorite books of 2016. A multigenerational epic centered on an interracial family, the Nowaks, this book touches on so many profound topics, from mental illness to intergenerational trauma to culture clash to the very question of what it means to be a family, all done in stunningl…

Jordanna Kalman is a fine art photographer who lives and works in New York. Jordanna’s work explores loneliness, femininity and individuality, and the images are highly personal. In her series Little Romances, she rephotographs prints of earlier images of hers which had been stolen and misused. By considering the prints as objects and adding new el…

For this installment of the KTCO Book Club, I’m joined by writer Alyssa Harad for a conversation about Tove Jansson’s 1982 novel The True Deceiver. Despite the slimness of the volume, Jansson’s novel yet contains a surprising degree of depth and complexity, not to mention psychological tension, in a story that challenges the reader to consider the …

Maggie Smith is a poet and essayist based in Bexley, Ohio. Maggie’s new book Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change was born out of a difficult life change; it both discusses and is an example of resilience and hope in the face of an unknown future. In our conversation, we talked about the book’s origins in a series of social media note…

In the inaugural KTCO Book Club episode I’m joined by writer and podcaster David Naimon, host of the literary podcast Between the Covers. For our conversation, David selected Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh’s hybrid photo/prose book Human Archipelago. In their collaboration, Cole’s writing and Sheikh’s images support each other in a way that expands the…

David Adjmi is a writer and playwright based in Los Angeles, CA. In his new memoir Lot Six, David tells the story of how he found himself through art and the theater, growing up feeling like an outsider as a gay, atheist, artistic youth in a small and insular Syrian Sephardic Jewish community in Brooklyn. In our conversation, David and I discussed …

Jessica Eaton is a photographer based in Montreal, Quebec. At first glance, the minimalist compositions in Jessica’s images might seem simple, but the process behind their creation is anything but. Using a series of color filters and a painstaking multiple exposure technique, she is able to use light to construct color. In our conversation, we disc…

Matthew Salesses is a writer based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Matthew’s new novel, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, is darkly funny, unsettling in the best way, and wholly original, the story of a Korean American man struggling simply to exist as he feels himself literally disappearing. In our conversation, Matthew and I discussed his book, the trap o…

Ross Sutherland is a writer and podcaster based in Peterborough, UK. Ross’s podcast Imaginary Advice is one of my favorites in any genre. Blending poetry, essay, and audio fiction with a wonderfully experimental approach to sound design, Imaginary Advice sounds like nothing else. In our conversation, Ross and I talked about what it’s like to make a…