This episode features Ron Slate reading from and discussing his debut collection The Incentive of the Maggot. Ron Slate is the winner of the 2004 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference's prestigious Bakeless Prize, selected by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. As Pinsky writes in his foreward to the collection, Slate "brings together the personal and the global in a way that is distinctive, subtle, defying expectations about what is political and what is personal."