Off the Page

In this episode, the 2nd in our Reclaiming What's Been Lost series, Aru Nair goes on a journey to India to understand how oral tradition preserves cultures. But when a surprise trip to her father's home town shows her a side if him she's never seen, she emerges with a new understanding of how the stories we tell shape the people we become.

Little Tokyo is a small neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. Since 1905, it has been home to generations of Japanese Americans. Today, gentrification is threatening to destroy everything these families have built. This episode tells the story of one community's struggle for survival and the ways in which historical development has both fractured and solidified its people. For some, home is a bed one sleeps in. For us, home is Little Tokyo.

Zach Williams' debut story collection, Beautiful Days, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2024. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University and holds an MFA from New York University. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Jones Lecturer Georgina Beaty reads “Shelter Seekers,” a story from her recent debut collection The Party is Here, and talks about writing the climate crisis and experimenting with form.

Georgina Beaty is the author of the short story collection The Party is Here (Freehand Books, 2021). Her fiction has appeared in New England Review, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, and elsewhere. As an actor and playwright, she’s worked with theatres across Canada and internationally. A 2020-2022 Stegner Fellow in fiction, she holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, has been supported by fiction residencies at MacDowell and The Banff Centre, and was a screenwriting resident at the Canadian Film Centre. She's currently a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University.

Jones Lecturer Georgina Beaty reads “Shelter Seekers,” a story from her recent debut collection The Party is Here, and talks about writing the climate crisis and experimenting with form.

Georgina Beaty is the author of the short story collection The Party is Here (Freehand Books, 2021). Her fiction has appeared in New England Review, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, and elsewhere. As an actor and playwright, she’s worked with theatres across Canada and internationally. A 2020-2022 Stegner Fellow in fiction, she holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, has been supported by fiction residencies at MacDowell and The Banff Centre, and was a screenwriting resident at the Canadian Film Centre. She's currently a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University.

In this episodes, Amanda Gunn reads from her debut collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2023).

Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as well as a PhD candidate in English at Harvard where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Her recent work appears in Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and Narrative Magazine.

Jackson Holbert reads poems from his debut book, Winter Stranger (2023, Milkweed Editions), which won the 2022 Max Ritvo Prize. Jackson was born and raised in eastern Washington. His work has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Nation, Narrative, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Iowa Review, and multiple editions of Best New Poets. He received his MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, The Stadler Center for Poetry, and The Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

Madeline Haze Curtis’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and The Forge Literary Magazine, among other publications. She received the Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. She holds a BA from Stanford University and is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Madeline Haze Curtis’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Copper Nickel, West Branch, and The Forge Literary Magazine, among other publications. She received the Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. She holds a BA from Stanford University and is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014), and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which was named the winner of the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Hieu is also a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a former Stegner Fellow, and a current Jones Lecturer in the creative writing program at Stanford. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu now lives in Oakland.