Francesca’s Substack

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

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

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.

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!