Author, essayist, poet and activist Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, writer, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). A finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize, she moved to the US at age 18 and earned an MA in English at Simmons College and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her honors include awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, Framingham State University's Miriam Levine Reader Award, and the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize. Her poetry appears in Seneca Review, Salamander, Plume, From the Fishouse, and elsewhere. Her new book is An Unruled Body: A Poet’s Memoir, just out from Restless Books, which is the winner of the 2021 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. Listen in and she and host Marion Roach Smith discuss writing into trauma in this new episode of the Qwerty podcast. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer and author Meg Kissinger spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has won two George Polk Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and two National Journalism Awards. Kissinger teaches investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a visiting professor at DePauw University, her alma mater. Her stories on the abysmal living conditions for people with mental illness inspired changes to Wisconsin law and led to the creation of hundreds of new housing units. Now, she has brought the knowledge, insights, determination and humility of a reporter’s eye to the vulnerability needed to get to heart of her own origin story and published her new book, While You Were Out: The Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer, essayist, speaker and activist Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil, Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, a NYT Editors’ Choice published in 2022 by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. He is also the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and he is the co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, LitHub, Orion Magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Known nationally and internationally as the woman who lived in one of the world’s smallest apartments, Felice Cohen is the award-winning author of the bestselling books Half In: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Forbidden Love, 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (...or More) (inspired by the YouTube video of her tiny NYC studio with over 25 million views) and What Papa Told Me, about her grandfather’s life before, during and after the Holocaust. Felice has been featured on Good Morning America, NBC, CBS, NPR, Time, Globe & Mail, New York Daily News, the Daily Mail and more. She speaks around the country leading memoir workshops, talking about how living tiny made her life larger as well as offering tips on organizing and decluttering, and about writing a book with her grandfather. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Washington Post contributing columnist and author Kate Cohen writes about American culture. Her new book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too), is just out. Listen in as we discuss her book, writing about faith and the loss of it, and so much more. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Mega-bestselling author Joanna Penn, whose 40 books span several genres, has now written a memoir after making three separate solo pilgrimage walks. The walks and this new book, Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways, allowed her to define for herself her personal definition of being a seeker. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the bookThe Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

When writer, author and advocate Kristin Jarvis Adams pitched a potential publisher on her book, she began with a sentence so startling that it made the publisher ask her to breakfast. The book that followed was full of such sentences. This is a conversation about an unlikely book on an nearly impossible topic to sell that worked. Be inspired by her tale. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Writer, author and advocate Virginia Sole-Smith knows how to write into other's biases, and she writes right into them, giving us new language while she explores diet culture, anti-fat bias, feminism and health. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life.

The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars and instructive posts and online classes, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Allison K. Williams utilized her years as what she calls an "unkind editor" to write and publish her fine book, Seven Drafts: Self-Edit like a Pro from Page to Book, which she discusses here on the Qwerty podcast. This skillfully constructed book breaks down the process of writing and self-editing into seven definitive drafts – the vomit draft, the story draft, the Character draft, the technical draft, the personal copyedit, the friend read and the editor read. Listen in and learn.

The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all my free webinars and instructive posts, as well as our online classes, our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Kerri Maher knows how to choose topics to write about. The author of the USA Today bestseller, The Paris Bookseller, is back with one of the most compelling topics of our time. Listen in and learn how to live this writing life. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know.