Literary Speaking

Michele Filgate shares how she pitched, placed and edited her anthology - What My Mother & I Don't Talk About. We discuss everything from how she pitched the project, the essay that started it all and how she edited the pieces to fit for publication. Michele also shares how to handle rejection when submitting essays to popular publications and her advice on how to get started.

Michele Filgate is a contributing editor at Literary Hub and the editor of a critically acclaimed anthology based on her Longreads essay, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, published by Simon & Schuster.

Writing about Sex and Feminism.Can you publish each book with a different publisher? How do you develop your characters as a feminist writer? Rachel Dewoskin, author of BANSHEE discusses how she teaches her students to write characters that are complex and multi-dimensional as well as how she's published each book with a different publisher. A rich experience of writing, editing, publishing and promoting multiple books successfully.

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of six novels, including Someday We Will Fly, Blind,  and Banshee. DeWoskin’s memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton 2005), about the years she spent in China as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera, has been published in six countries and is in development at BBC America, where DeWoskin is co-writing a TV series based on the book. She is on the core fiction faculty and is an affiliated faculty member of Jewish Studies and East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. You can visit her online at www.racheldewoskin.com

Book publicist and author Cameron Dezen Hammon discusses the work of a book publicist, which social media avenues to explore and which ones not to waste money on. She also shares the value of Bookstagrammers and what it's like working with a book publicist to market your book. Cameron believes good publicity is about finding what’s newsworthy about you and your book and amplifying that message. It’s about getting your book into the hands of reviewers, interviewers, and influencers who will share it with their networks. She also offers services in building your online presence, media coaching, and book launch event planning.

Cameron Dezen Hammon’s writing has appeared in Ecotone, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, The Butter, Nylon, Them, The Houston Chronicle, and more. Her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017. She’s contributed to several anthologies and is the co-founder of The Slant reading series, host of The Ish Podcast, and her debut book This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession is forthcoming from Lookout Books in October 2019.

We're only human and we all struggle to quiet the IA - our inner asshole - as Jen Pastiloff coined it. In this episode Jen shares how her agent found her, what it's like building a large social platform and using a street team based on community sharing to promote her book, On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real & Listening Hard. We also discuss the art of the ask when it comes to blurbs and book proposals.

Jen Pastiloff is the facilitator of the popular “On Being Human” workshops, founder of the online magazine The Manifest-Station, and author of On Being Human: a Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real & Listening Hard. Jen leads retreats all over the world in Italy and France, as well as my personal favourite, Writing & The Body Workshops with author Lidia Yuknavitch. She’s been featured on Good Morning America, in New York Magazine, Health Magazine, Shape, People Magazine, CBS News and more. You can find her online at www.jenniferpastiloff.com

Kirsten Ott Palladino, co-founder of Equally Wed.com the digital leader for gay, lesbian, transgender, queer and bisexual weddings, penned the perfect book proposal in just one weekend! Listen in as she shares her experience writing a book proposal in 48 hours, which books she recommends and how she wrote, pitched and published her non-fiction book - Equally Wed: The Ultimate Guide to Planning Your LGBTQ+ Wedding.

Kirsten Ott Palladino is an award-winning writer and editor, and one of the world’s most notable experts on LGBTQ+ weddings. She's been featured in and on numerous publications and media outlets such as: The New York Times, The Advocate, Out magazine, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Lucky magazine, The Knot and Time magazine to ABC News, CNN, NPR, DailyCandy, Politico and Glamour magazine. Her writing has appeared in Washington Post, the Manifest-Station, Entreprenuer magazine, ARTnews magazine, the Atlantan magazine, and more. In 2016, Palladino founded the Wedding Equality Alliance, an international group of wedding professionals committed to tearing down exclusionary walls in the typically heteronormative wedding industry. She educates wedding and event pros about LGBTQ+ inclusion through the online certification program at equallywedpro.com and teaches at conferences and workshops worldwide. Palladino lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her wife and their twin sons. Learn more about the author at kirstenpalladino.com

Author T Kira Madden discusses how she wrote her book, Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls using elements of fiction writing, hybrid formats not typically seen in memoir and the importance of building a solid literary community with kindness. T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an BA in design and literature from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS, is available now. There is no period in her name.

Nastashia Minto author and poet of the memoir NAKED: The rhythm and groove of it. The length and depth to it. discusses how she published her work, set up readings and marketed her memoir.

Nastashia Minto is an African American woman who was born in South Georgia and raised there by her grandparents. She grew up in poverty and around drugs, alcohol, and family violence. Her life experiences led her to obtain an associate’s degree in occupational therapy and a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She has been writing since she was nine years old and has found that her writing offers her another way to help people. Currently residing in Portland, Oregon, she has been a featured at many popular local reading series, including Unchaste Readers, Grief Rites, and Incite. Her writing has been published in SUSAN and in the Unchaste Anthology, volume III.

Nicole Chung discusses life as an editor in chief for Catapult Magazine and writing her memoir All You Can Ever Know. She shares how long it took to write the proposal and the book as well as navigating book tours, writing about adoption as a transracial adoptee. Packed full of writing and editing tips Nicole also shares what she's looking for as the editor in chief of Catapult Magazine.

Nicole Chung has written for The New York Times, GQ, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Hazlitt, and Shondaland, among other publications. She is the editor in chief of Catapult magazine’s editor in chief and the former managing editor of The Toast. She currently lives in the Washington, D.C., area. All You Can Ever Know is her first book. Follow her on Twitter at @nicole_soojung.

Book Agent Eric Smith of P.S. Literary discusses life as a Literary Agent and MFA Professor. What platform really means to book agents, queries that grab his attention, a typical day in the life of a literary agent and forthcoming works by his clients. Eric Smith is a Literary Agent with P.S. Literary, Author of The Geek’s Guide to Dating, He has also published an anthology titled, Welcome Home. His latest Young Adult book, The Girl and the Grove is available for purchase now. His next novel, Reclaim the Sun, will be published by Inkyard Press / Harlequin Teen in 2020. Eric also teaches composition and mentors MFA students at Arcadia University from afar.

Award Winning Author Pam Houston discusses her memoir, Deep Creek Finding Hope In The High Country. Listen in as she shares her writing and editing process, the moment when her editor read the first draft and said it wasn't the book she was expecting and how Pam manages life as a writer, teacher and mentor while raising a family of animals on her beautiful 120 acre Ranch in the Colorado Rockies.

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.  Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards.  She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.