Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

Abhishek Pandit is a jack of all trades: a coder, a novelist, a playwright, and a globetrotter with a passion for languages and cultural syncretism. In this episode, he joins us to discuss his musical Earth Icon, which braids together themes including climate change, emergent technologies, displacement, motherhood, and home in a dynamic portrait of a Puerto Rican family living in Missouri. Also mentioned are the tyranny of authenticity, Abhishek’s novel about Moroccan time travelers, and the opportunities for growth and connection made possible by multimedia and multicultural literature. 

Rebecca Macijeski is a poet, editor, and educator. She’s published two collections, Autobiography and Apocryphal Girl, and holds a PhD in English with a focus in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

In this episode, Rebecca shares her professional advice for young and emerging writers, gleaned from decades of experience as a poet and educator.  

Tamara Nemirovsky is an award-winning filmmaker and professor of film studies at the University of South Florida. In this episode, we discuss her 2023 documentary Second Chances, which follows the harrowing journeys of four individuals striving to recover from addiction in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, before touching on the equally harrowing challenges of balancing the demands of life, academic work, and a creative practice. 

Spencer Sutton studied art and religion at Connecticut College and now lives, works, and creates in Brooklyn. In this episode, we discuss the intersection of art, mythology, modernity, faith, and the hero’s journey as it maps onto everyday life. 

Crisosto Apache is a poet and Associate Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. Originally from the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné of the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. Their books include Genesis, which retraces the fraught history of conflicts between the United States and First Nations, Ghostword, which constitutes an ongoing conversation with the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and the forthcoming Is(ness). They hold an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

Kathryn Trueblood is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, Professor of English at Western Washington University, and faculty member of The Red Badge Project, which serves active-duty soldiers and veterans in Washington through storytelling. Her work is firmly situated in the medical humanities and has won the Rico Award in Prose, the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and the Red Hen Press Short Story Award. Her most recent novel, Take Daily As Needed (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), deals with parenting while chronically ill with the desperado humor that the subject deserves. 

In this episode, we discuss the economic and cultural challenges faced by 21st-century academics and professionals, which form a backdrop for Kathryn’s complicated experience, documented in a forthcoming memoir, of helping her mother transition out of this world. 

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. He is the author of two novels, The Oracle of Stamboul and The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, as well as a contributor to the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Oakland and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University. 

In this episode, we discuss Michael’s books, in particular a forthcoming historical/speculative novel about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the marvelous capacity of speculative fiction to generate nuanced discussions of complex and contentious conflicts, present and past. 

Michele Reale is an author, librarian, ethnographer, and editor of two literary magazines, Ovunque Siamo and Red Fern Review. She holds three master’s degrees—in English, Library Sciences, and creative writing, respectively—and teaches at Arcadia University. Her academic interests include, but are not limited to, poetry, library science, contemporary Italian-American writing, and the intersection of Italian-American culture with race and migration. 

* For more on this topic, check out this post on The DateKeepers blog:

https://www.thedatekeepers.com/post/what-is-a-book-coach-and-do-you-need-one

What is book coaching? What sorts of writers hire book coaches? What kind of working relationship can you expect to have with your book coach? And do you really need one? 

In this episode, we discuss these questions and more, share our firsthand experiences, and equip you with knowledge that you’ll need to make informed decisions while building your artistic career. 

Luis Quijano is a pioneering designer-scientist and Fulbright scholar with one foot in the sciences and the other in the arts. We discuss his work with bacterial cellulose and other biological materials, which is rapidly redefining the fashion industry, as well as the joys and challenges of operating at the intersection between divergent disciplines. If you’re open to collaborating on projects in pursuit of a more sustainable—and fashionable—future, Luis would love to hear from you.