Betsy Lerner is the author of the recently released novel, Shred Sisters. She is also the author The Bridge Ladies, The Forest for the Trees and Food and Loathing. With Temple Grandin, she is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. She received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry where she was selected as one of PEN’s Emerging Writers. She also received the Tony Godwin Publishing Prize for Editors. After working as an editor for 15 years, she became an agent and is currently a partner with Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency.

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Tracy K. Smith is the author of five poetry collections, including Such Color: New and Selected Poems; Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her debut collection, The Body’s Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002. Her second book, Duende, won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She also edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.

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Rachel Cockerell was born and raised in London, the sixth of seven children. Melting Point is her first nonfiction book. Her research has taken her to Texas, Ohio, New York, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem.

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Joy Harjo was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation.  She is the author of more than ten books of poetry including Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years and the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise, which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner.  Her new book is Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief.

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Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.  Her new novel is This Here is Love.

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Ed Park is  the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice and has worked in newspapers and book publishing.  His debut story collection is An Oral History of Atlantis.

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Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book of short stories is called Stag Dance. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Marta, Colombia.

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Sue Monk Kidd writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, The Invention of Wings, and The Book of Longings. Some of her non-fiction titles include The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. In this episode we discuss her new novel The Book of Longings

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Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and Park City, Utah with her husband, two sons and two Great Danes. Her novel is called Penitence.

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Robert Macfarlane is a British writer internationally known for his writing on nature, people, and place.  His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind.  They have been translated into more than 30 languages and won many prizes around the world and have been adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance.  He has also written operas, plays and films including river and mountain.  In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forester Prize for literature.  Macfarlane lives in Cambridge England where he is a fellow at Emmanual College, Cambridge.

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