"The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Shores, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he'd take him there after finishing an errand."

Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads--in pure Hiaasen-style--into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption. Figgo, it turns out, is the only hate-monger ever to be kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too dumb and incompetent. On January 6, 2021 he thought he was defacing a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but he wound up spreading feces all over a statue of James Zacharia George, a Civil War Confederate war leader.

Figgo's already messy life is about to get more complicated, thanks to two formidable adversaries. Viva Morales is a newly transplanted Floridian, a clever woman recently taken to the cleaners by her ex-husband, now working at the Mink Foundation, a supposedly philanthropic organization, and renting a room in Figgo's apartment because there's no place else she can afford. Twilly Spree has an anger management problem, especially when it comes to those who deface the environment, and way too many inherited millions of dollars. He's living alone a year after his dog died, two years after he sank a city councilman's party barge, and three years after his divorce.

Viva and Twilly are plunged into a mystery--involving dark money and darker motives--they are determined to solve, and become entangled in a world populated by some of Hiaasen's most outrageous characters: Claude and Electra Mink--billionaire philanthropists with way too much plastic surgery and a secret right-wing agenda--and Congressman Clure Boyette--who dreams of being Florida's (and maybe America's) most important politician. The only things standing in his way are his love for hookers and young girls, and his total lack of intelligence. We meet Noel Kristianson--a Scandinavian agnostic injured when Figgo thinks he's a Jewish threat to humanity and runs him over with his car; Jonas Onus--Figgo's partner in white power idiocy; and many, many more. Hiaasen ties them all together and delivers them to their appropriate fates, in his wildest and most entertaining novel to date.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593320945?ic_referral=buVkiKXagdo8yfczGc_a5-E3MKoImUfaX8wTdHeuKj0wM4c2n3rwGcDgn9JUSWHelVpT9XdydpPrgcEgM-brBVWF8j6b_ZsYls4Td3oZmf-ArSU8xtmNMI459uU_iiFN9sm01Uk

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of fourteen previous novels, including the bestsellers Squeeze Me, Razor Girl, Star Island, Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy, and Lucky You, and seven bestselling children's books, Hoot, Flush, Scat, Chomp, Skink, and Squirm. His novel, BAD MONKEY, was recently adapted into a hit series on Apple TV+ starring Vince Vaughn.

*recorded 5/18/2025

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects.

Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name "Woman Killer," and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner's photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations.

Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Martha A. Sandweiss is professor emerita of history at Princeton University, where she is founding director of the Princeton & Slavery Project. She is the award-winning author of many books, including Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West.

Sandweiss will be in conversation with James Grossman. Grossman is Executive Director of the American Historical Association.  Formerly Vice-President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library, he has taught at University of Chicago and University of California, San Diego. The author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900-1929, Grossman was project director and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago. He is editor emeritus of the University of Chicago Press book series "Historical Studies of Urban America," which he abandoned to his colleagues after 50 volumes. Articles and short essays have focused on urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in education and public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, New York Daily News, North Shore Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, Inside Higher Ed, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Miami Herald, and elsewhere. 

*recorded 5/17/2025

How does the son of a Presbyterian minister wind up winning a Pulitzer Prize for writing a wildly inaccurate newspaper column read by millions of people?

In Class Clown, Dave Barry takes us on a hilarious ride, starting with a childhood largely spent throwing rocks for entertainment--there was no internet--and preparing for nuclear war by hiding under a classroom desk. After literally getting elected class clown in high school, he went to college, where, as an English major, he read snippets of great literature when he was not busy playing in a rock band (it was the sixties).

He began his journalism career at a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper where he learned the most important rule of local journalism: never confuse a goose with a duck. His journey then took a detour into the business world, where as a writing consultant he spent years trying, with limited success, to get corporate folks to, for God's sake, get the point. Somehow from there he wound up as a humor columnist for The Miami Herald, where his boss was a wild man who encouraged him to write about anything that struck him as amusing and to never worry about alienating anyone.

His columns were not popular with everyone: He managed to alienate a vast army of Neil Diamond fans, and the entire state of Indiana. But he also developed a loyal following of readers who alerted him to the threat of exploding toilets, not to mention the fire hazards posed by strawberry pop-tarts and Rollerblade Barbie, which he demonstrated to the nation on the David Letterman show. He led his readers on a crusade against telemarketers that ultimately caused the national telemarketers association to stop answering its own phones because it was getting--irony alert--too many unwanted calls. He has also run for president multiple times, although so far without success.

He became a book author and joined a literary rock band, which was not good at playing music but did once perform with Bruce Springsteen, who sang backup to Dave. As for his literary merits, Dave writes: "I'll never have the critical acclaim of, say, Marcel Proust. But was Marcel Proust ever on Carson? Did he ever steal a hotel sign for Oprah?"

Class Clown isn't just a memoir; it's a vibrant celebration of a life rich with humor, absurdity, joy, and sadness. Dave says the most important wisdom imparted by his Midwestern parents was never to take anything too seriously. This laughter-filled book is proof that he learned that lesson well.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668021781?ic_referral=SZV1sTeYEH-PIUSlQjWjwIUFolGclDeGLUCGD0K-IuIwM2_z67wNj76oCIF3Pb2_lj8L_fXfHLHpxZPdIoBqCr-y0ruPe9RYxLaBROIhbung-UMBbTzmIh6iAAuU8y2JCeztsFQ

Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Swamp Story, Lessons from Lucy, Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns Forty, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami.

*recorded 5/17/2025

With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what's gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it's running on vibes. By "vibes," Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials whose views are no longer shared by a majority of the country.

Dahlia Lithwick's Lady Justice meets Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad as Litman employs pop culture references and the latest decisions to deliver a funny, zeitgeisty, pulls-no-punches cri de coeur undergirded by impeccable scholarship. She gives us the tools we need to understand the law, the dynamics of courts, and the stakes of this current moment--even as she makes us chuckle on every page and emerge empowered to fight for a better future.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668054628?ic_referral=UzuWCEi5ZFDi9iSokhXIz_bgOr4w5HcXesTcqfPVG98wM9cd2lQIA06yM5eEjSkE3lswh1poDIzDsbgv4cU22ABBty-GxU0yAMM1xhVxdJKFZD0y2DDvm0rUogAgSJZgtL-n_w

Leah Litman is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and a former Supreme Court clerk. In addition to cohosting Strict Scrutiny, she writes frequently about the Court for media outlets including The Washington Post, Slate, and The Atlantic, among others, and has appeared as a commentator on NPR and MSNBC, in addition to other venues. She has received the Ruth Bader Ginsburg award for her "scholarly excellence" from the American Constitution Society and published in top law reviews. Follow her on X @LeahLitman and Instagram @ProfLeahLitman.

*recorded 5/16/2025

On Little Great Island, climate change is disrupting both life and love. 

After offending the powerful pastor of a cult, Mari McGavin has to flee with her six-year-old son. With no money and no place else to go, she returns to the tiny Maine island where she grew up—a place she swore she’d never see again. There Mari runs into her lifelong friend Harry Richardson, one of the island’s summer residents, now back himself to sell his family’s summer home. Mari and Harry’s lives intertwine once again, setting off a chain of events as unexpected and life altering as the shifts in climate affecting the whole ecosystem of the island…from generations of fishing families to the lobsters and the butterflies. 
Little Great Island illustrates in microcosm the greatest changes of our time and the unyielding power of love.

In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell's story depicts the neighborhood's battle to save the trees and combat climate change: The midwife who builds a geothermal energy system on the block, the Congressman who battles cancer and climate change at the same time, and the Chinese-American climate scientist who wants to bury billions of the world's dying trees to store their carbon and help stabilize the atmosphere.

The story goes beyond ailing trees as Tidwell chronicles people on his block coping with Lyme disease, a church with solar panels on its roof and floodwater in its basement, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids -all in the same neighborhood and all against the backdrop of 2023's record global temperatures and raging wildfires and hurricanes. Then there's Tidwell himself who explores the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the idea of "geoengineering" as a last-ditch way to save the world's trees - and human communities everywhere - by reflecting sunlight away from the planet.

No book has told the story of climate change this way: hyper-local, full of surprises, full of true stories of life and death in one neighborhood. The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue is a harrowing and hopeful proxy for every street in America and every place on Earth.

Kate Woodworth is the author of the novel Racing Into the Dark (EP Dutton, 1989), hailed as “A compelling exploration of mental illness” by Booklist and as an “auspicious debut” by Publishers Weekly. Her short stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah and other literary journals. A retired medical writer in addition to fiction writer, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her writing.

Woodworth is in conversation with Mike Tidwell and Jim Lardner. Tidwell is a writer and climate activist living in the Washington, DC region. His most recent book is The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street (St. Martin’s Press, March 2025). Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called the book a “powerful work (that) will stick with readers long after they finish the last page.”

Lardner is a journalist and one of the 70,000+ members of Third Act, a national organization of Americans over 60 working for a sustainable planet and a credible democracy. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Prospect and The New York Review of Books, among other print and online publications. His books include “NYPD: A City and Its Police” (co-author) and “Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences” (contributor and co-editor).

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/kate-woodworth

*recorded 5/15/2025

Tattooing within Indigenous communities is a time-honored practice that binds the tattoo recipient to a deeply felt collective history. More than mere decoration, tattoos embody cultural values, ancestral ties, and spiritual beliefs. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions captures ancient tribal tattooing practices and their contemporary resurgence, highlighting a beautiful aspect of humanity's shared cultural heritage.

Transporting readers through history, Lars Krutak explores the art and customs of tattooing across numerous ancestral lands, including Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, the Arctic, Oceania, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. He illustrates how tattoos function as a form of writing that defines and structures community life, performing as rites of passage, symbols of rank, and signs of marital or religious devotion, among other facets of culture. We are introduced to the heavily tattooed Li women of China's Hainan Island with their elaborate facial and body tattoos, the bold indelible markings of Papua New Guinea's Indigenous peoples, and innovative cultural tattoo practitioners who are rebuilding a skin-marking legacy for future generations to come.

With numerous images published for the first time and an illuminating foreword by cultural historian Sean Mallon, Indigenous Tattoo Traditions opens a window onto one of the world's most vibrant yet misunderstood mediums of human expression.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691255392?ic_referral=8oMu76QJ0M6QFHkXwl1oGKGrjlsAGgz05fqsg06Hsd8wM8_WPlHyZhgBAc0HsLp0AHnq0e1CG69NIF1v6yRS9X2r_3F8osHyjDiAWoKwGQvHE_Uenpo-zkNe_N_YyuW79C2xfZs

Lars Krutak, PhD, is a tattoo anthropologist, photographer, and writer based in Washington, D.C. A research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he is the author of several books on Indigenous tattoo culture and practice, including (2012) Spiritual Skin: Magical Tattoos and Scarification, (2014) Tattoo Traditions of Native North America, (2024) Tattoo Traditions of Asia, and the forthcoming (2025) Indigenous Tattoo Traditions published by Princeton University Press. He hosted the Discovery Channel series Tattoo Hunter and his writing has also appeared in scientific journals, edited volumes, and popular magazines worldwide.

Krutak is in conversation with Sara Kehaulani Goo, a journalist, author and news leader based in Washington, D.C. She's led some of the nation's largest news organizations, including serving as editor-in-chief of Axios; managing editor of NPR and senior news director and reporter at The Washington Post. She's also the author of the forthcoming book, Kuleana -- a story of family, land and legacy in Old Hawai'i (Macmillan, 2025). Set in remote Maui, Kuleana is Sara's memoir about her family's struggle to hold onto ancestral land given to her Native Hawaiian family from King Kamehameha III and, in doing so, she comes to better understand Native Hawaiians' her own identity and cultural practice. 

*recorded 5/15/2025

It's spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein--mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite--is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.

But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs? 

Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart's content, she begins to realize she can't reprogram her ex-husband, her children, her friends, or the roster of paramours that's grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593718339?ic_referral=sBIehjqxq6zrVlt70ISUiq_9dqbyLeNX3XYRuYjgveswM1UheQYx0m_EWMZrv_LHJRrXsQqp9DICOs0wJaAdEm37iJF2l2gxizJzz7egES4G8muwiK5BNqcSFGcfsVZ_GXScnw

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically-acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean from Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, JSTOR, and Condé Nast, among other organizations, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, "Modern Love" column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O, The Oprah Magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, Literary Hub, The Millions, The Rumpus, and other publications. Amy Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Shearn is in conversation with Chloe Yelena Miller. Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Viable (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and Perforated (forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books in 2026). Miller teaches workshops through Politics and Prose Bookstore and privately. She co-founded Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community, with Shasta Grant. Learn more about her here: www.chloeyelenamiller.com

*recorded 5/10/2025

A courtly man of Southern roots, Murray Kempton worked as a labor reporter for the New York Post, won a Pulitzer Prize while at Newsday, and was arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along the way. He wore three piece suits and polished oxfords and was known for riding his bicycle around New York City while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe with wild red hair that later turned white. He developed a taste for baroque prose and became, in the words of Robert Silvers, his editor at The New York Review of Books, ''unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.''

He went to court proceedings and traffic accidents and funerals and to speeches by people who either were or wanted to be rich and famous. He wrote about everything and anybody--Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover.

From dispatches from a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, an Iowa cornfield with Nikita Krushchev, an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, and Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union (these last two assignments filed by a reporter in his 70s), Kempton's concerns and interests were extraordinarily broad. He wrote about subjects from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur; organized labor and McCarthyism; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; presidential hopefuls and Mafiosi; frauds and failures of all stripes; the "splendors and miseries" of life in New York City.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644214510?ic_referral=T7OWiKw14FY0qi2SbRyaxUCUMu1vaLjH_aXnVEFSUNIwM4mhKSFzYukvHqsjXQN9_5EycLz1xsRyzd2_EMP231qOtC8oFOPD7qQRfc7MY811dnCzvYYG0ny_ZO8sqjxlle9D980

Andrew Holter is a historian and writer based in Chicago, formerly of Frederick, Maryland, and Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Lapham's Quarterly, and other publications. As an independent historical researcher, he has contributed to books, radio programs, and museum exhibitions, and served as the primary archival consultant for Theo Anthony's 2016 documentary Rat Film, which the New Yorker called one of "62 Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking."

Holter is in conversation with Dave Zirin. Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation Magazine, their first sports editor in over 150 years of existence. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sport, including most recently The Kaepernick Effect. In addition, he is the co-producer and writer of the new documentary, Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin is a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC, and Democracy Now! He also hosts The Nation’s Edge of Sports podcast and Edge of Sports TV on The Real News Network. 

*recorded 5/8/2025

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie's disappearance may not be accidental.

Heartwood is a "gem of a thousand facets--suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending," (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker's odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character's interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is a redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668063606?ic_referral=lmzJ3HJJHK8lVNsY0a05gSAIdEP8Wq1feoCjtKVMED8wMwhv57cGRUgI_hHui1BHbz0WX8vacF7Y5huautKuNZMrPKZLS5no0HVapAC1JmQmXDkcRo83q7GHzFr07pCong0hfQ

Amity Gaige is the author of four previous novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and Sea Wife. Sea Wife was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice Award. Schroder was also a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2013 according to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others, and was shortlisted for UK's Folio Prize in 2014. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. In 2018, Amity was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

Gaige is in conversation with Angie Kim, a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. Kim has written for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Glamour, and numerous literary journals.

*recorded 5/3/2025

Combining the powers of speculation of Kazuo Ishiguro and the sharp social critique of Aravind Adiga, Katy Family offers readers the ultimate experience of global fiction, stories bound and shaped by Katy, Texas, a place made by oil and capitalism. The stories weave between Bangladeshi characters experiencing the reality of the immigrant experience in America and those still in Bangladesh, wishing for the mythos of the American dream. Katy, an oil-rich suburb of Houston, serves as the background and ultimate symbol of global capitalism. The stories deliver the reality and impact of isolation, materialism, and the looming climate disaster. With sharp intelligence and humor, Wahhaj explores the oil industry's destructive effect on those who live within Texas and those far beyond its borders

Gemini Wahhaj is a Bangladeshi American writer living in the US. She wrote her debut novel The Children of This Madness as a new immigrant in the US, while she was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and war raged in Iraq. She is grateful to publish the novel in December of this year, in the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war, about Bengalis living in Texas, and their complicated history with both Iraq and the US.

Kurt Baumeister's Twilight of the Gods is satire and alternate history on an operatic, cinematic, and cosmic scale, with a cast that transcends time and space. The grinding of The Wheel of Fate is heard in Valhalla, as it is in Berlin and Boston. Can Odin's many schemes be undone? Who can rewire the robotic nightmare of politics and write a brighter future for humanity? Only humanity's champion, the long misunderstood, supposed force of evil, Loki. This is a tale of fallen gods and failing humanity, of love lost and found, of parents and children, magic and sex, art and lies, good, evil, and the end of Fate. This is the story of Loki. In his own words.

Kurt Baumeister is the author of the novels Pax Americana and the forthcoming Twilight of the Gods. An editor with 7.13 Books, his writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, and other outlets. Find him on the internet at kurtbaumeister.com.

Shimul Saha Mou, widely known as Shimul Mou, has been living in the United States for the past 26 years. Born into a family rooted in journalism and diplomacy, she was raised in a home where tradition, art, music, and politics were part of everyday life. Today, she proudly serves as a Senior IT Consultant with the Office of the Chief Technology Officer in Washington, D.C. A passionate advocate for women in technology, Shimul is equally committed to cultural preservation and community empowerment. She played a key role in founding the first Bangla School in the nation’s capital, nurturing identity and pride among Bangladeshi-American youth. She is also a core organizer of a nonprofit uplifting women in the DMV area—working to amplify voices, create sisterhood, and inspire the next generation of changemakers.

Javed Jahangir’s fiction has been published in LUMINA Literary Journal (Sarah Lawrence College), HIMAL Magazine, Smokelong Journal, LOST Magazine, Bengal Lights Journal, Six Seasons Review, Daily Star, Bangladesh and others. He was on the 2011 panel of judges for the RISCA (Rhode Island State Council Arts) Fiction Fellowship award. He was part of Jenna Blum’s Master Class at Grub
Street. He has contributed to, and been editor-in-chief for The Grub Street Writers’ 10 year Anthology, and has been a reader for the Harvard Review. His novel, Ghost Alley was published by Bengal Foundation Publishing, and debuted at the Hay Festival in 2014. Ghost Alley was reviewed in Wasafiri Journal. He is currently working on a second novel, and a collection of short stories. 

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/wahhaj-baumeister

*recorded 4/26/2025