Castle Hill Author Talks

In The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, prize-winning short story writer Deesha Philyaw tells the outrageous, daring, and ultimately triumphant story of Scharisse Freeman, the wife of a popular and powerful megachurch pastor who upends her charmed “rags-to-Rolex” life when her secret past comes roaring into the spotlight. It's a satirical wild ride of a novel that packs an emotional punch, touching on many of the same issues Philyaw addressed in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, but in a radically different package. Philyaw joins us to talk about the long path to finishing this novel, lying pastors and the lengths they'll go to protect the church at the expense of women and girls, and why she believes that books that are funny and sexy can be serious too. 

This week, host Karen Dukess tells an unfortunately true story about what AI fabricated about her and a recently published novel. After an end-of-summer break, we'll be back with more author interviews later this month.

In her instant NYT bestselling memoir,  Emilee Hackney offers a blisteringly honest, loving and unflinching portrait of her native Appalachia and the tumultuous adolescence that took her from  radical Pentecostalism to the classrooms of Harvard.  Emilee joins us to talk about the nuances of the  Appalachian region and people, the life of submission and repentance she would have had if not for a shocking discovery about her fiancé, and how writing helped her find her voice and her place in the world. 

The NYTimes bestselling author (The Nest, Good Company) discusses her fascination with the 1970s, when divorce came to her hometown of Rochester, New York: why it's great to be a late-blooming author; and what she does when the writing starts to feel like a slog. 

Annabel Monaghan, the NYT best-selling author of such runaway hits as Dolly All The Time and Nora Goes Off Script, is the queen of smart, witty, grown-up romance. In this wide-ranging interview, she talks about why she loves writing about women in their late thirties; how she copes with that inevitable panicky stage when her drafts feel disastrous; the novel she’d love to write, but never will; and the rule-breaking book that first made her think she could be a writer.   

A brilliant and gripping debut, Shannon Sanders' The Great Wherever is about a heartbroken and financially strapped millennial who inherits her father's share of a Tennessee farm purchased by her great-grandfather, one of the first Black landowners in his community. Shannon joins us to talk about the family farm that inspired the novel, the value of having a homestead even if no one lives there, and why the novel is narrated by a gossipy clan of family ghosts.

Truly a novel for our times, The Emilys is about motherhood, friendship, marriage, and community and how to navigate these things in a world that is forcing us to reckon with the physical environment in unsettling ways. If you're looking for a smart, speculative, literary page-turner, this episode is for you.

Heather Abel’s second novel, The Emilys (Random House), came out inJune, 2026. Her debut novel, The Optimistic Decade (Algonquin) was published in May, 2018. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the online Paris Review among other places. She worked as a reporter and editor in California and Colorado before moving to New York where she received an MFA in fiction writing from the New School University. She lives in Northampton, MA and currently teaches creative writing at Smith College. Follow her on instagram here and find her website here.

If you’ve ever bemoaned the lure of your I-phone, you’re not alone. In this interview, Emmy-winning MSNOW host Chris Hayes explains how our attention is being extracted against our will for corporate gain. His NYT best-selling book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource is a powerful reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society. This episode was recorded as a live zoom interview in February 2026.

London 1953: A boarding house, a dead body, and so many secrets. Reading Emma Garman's debut novel, The Kindness of Strangers, is like discovering a forgotten classic from the 1950s that was written with a surprisingly modern sensibility. An ingeniously plotted and moving story, this one's a must for mystery lovers.

Christina Baker Kline’s THE FOURSOME is a riveting novel based on the true story of the author’s distant relatives, sisters in 19th-century North Carolina who married conjoined twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, with whom they had 21 children. Christina Baker Kline joins us to discuss how she blended imagination and historical research, why she thinks this is ultimately a novel about slavery and complicity, and how she tackled the daunting issue of writing about the sisters’ intimate lives with their conjoined husbands.