This Mama Is Lit!

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Martheaus Perkins, author of The Grace of Black Mothers, about Black motherhood, poetic form, and the complicated inheritance of the American Dream.

Martheaus Perkins is a first-generation college graduate and son of a single Black mother. He is the author of The Grace of Black Mothers, published with Trio House Press. His writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, diode, Obsidian, Mizna, and Beloit. The name “Martheaus” is a collection of each woman who raised him: “Mar-” was his grandmother, “-Thea-” is his mother, and “-us” represents the aunties who created the name.

Perkins’ debut poetry collection, The Grace of Black Mothers, is a lyrical reckoning, finding grace through Black mothers, aunties, and grannies. Mamie Till-Mobley, Sybrina Fulton, Harriet Tubman, and the author’s own mothers guide readers through the collection. All the while, Perkins brings an array of poetic forms to genres such as fighting game menus, optometry charts, screenplays, pirate codes, and social media threads. The Grace of Black Mothers includes homemade heroes and villains, justice and fabrication, wit and risk, resurrection and erasure.

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Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Heather Sweeney, author of Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage, about identity, divorce, and rebuilding after years as a military spouse.

Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage is about Heather Sweeney’s journey from being overshadowed by her husband’s military career to rediscovering her identity as a single mother. The memoir explores how military spouses often conform to a support role that is secondary to their spouse’s military career. Sweeney writes about how the hardships of military life contribute to her adaptability and resilience.

Heather Sweeney is the author of the memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage. She writes about divorce, life as a military spouse, parenting, and women’s health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Newsweek, Business Insider, Good Housekeeping, and Military.com. She lives in Virginia, and Camouflage is her first book.

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Amanda Fields and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Whitney French, author of Syncopation: A Novel in Verse, about memory, identity, and what it means to reshape yourself in a fractured world.

In Syncopation: A Novel in Verse, in the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into new cultures, castes, and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories, and hyperloop terminals, this novel-in-verse emphasizes memory as the highest currency and love as dangerous, unruly, and singed with hope.

The protagonists are O and Z, two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers, and are conflicted between choosing their values or each other.

In this speculative novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labor, and survival.

Whitney French is a writer, educator, and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019) and Griot: Six Writers’ Sojourn into the Dark (Knopf Canada, 2022). Whitney is a Black futurist who explores memory, loss, technology, and nature in her work. She is a certified arts educator and an assistant professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, the only Black queer feminist press in Canada.

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Syncopation: A Novel in Verse

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Amanda and Sam chat with Lara Ehrlich, author of Bind Me Tighter Still, about domesticity and wildness in motherhood, the fierce love for our children, and feeling like we’re always falling short.

In Bind Me Tighter Still, the youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto, is weary of an existence driven by hunger. She trades her tail for legs, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter—only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood. In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque called Sirenland and reinvents herself, performing as a siren in a tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She hires and trains human women to perform with her, and Sirenland becomes a national roadside attraction. Her daughter Naia performs as well, until she turns 15 and begins to resist the world her mother has created.

Lara Ehrlich is the author of the story collection Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020) and the novel Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025). Lara is also the host of Writer Mother Monster, a podcast that has featured more than 100 conversations with writer–mothers navigating the tension between artistic ambition and caregiving. Her writing has been published in StoryQuarterly, Hunger Mountain Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Hub, and others, and she is the writer in residence at Connecticut College. She is the founder and director of Thought Fox Writers Den and lives with her family in Connecticut.

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www.LaraEhrlich.com

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https://redhen.org/book/bind-me-tighter-still/

Mentioned in the episode:

Nobody’s Girl

Hans Christian Andersen

Disney’s The Little Mermaid

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Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Chloe Yelena Miller, author of Perforated, about impossible wishes and material fears in parenting and poetry.

In her second full-length poetry collection, Perforated, Miller’s poems span the grief of public and private losses. The poems are situated in both the US and Italy, ruminating on topics such as immigration, climate change, school shootings, and 9/11.

Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, DC, with her partner and child. She’s the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books, and the poetry chapbook Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She co-founded and co-directs Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore, and New Directions in Writing. Miller has a Bachelor of Arts in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003.)

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Bluesky

Milk Journal

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Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Rebecca Lehmann, author of The Beheading Game, about rewriting Anne Boleyn through the lens of motherhood, the punishment of powerful women, crafting a queer love story, and bringing poetry to the novel-writing process.

Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer (which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College. The Beheading Game is her debut novel.

In The Beheading Game, Anne Boleyn wakes up the day after her execution, sews her head back on, and seeks vengeance on Henry VIII.

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Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Chloé Caldwell, author of Trying, about loneliness in infertility, contradictions with IVF in the queer community, and the rawness of writing in the moment. Over the years that Chloé had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.

Chloé Caldwell is the author of the national bestselling novella, Women (recently reissued by Harper Perennial) and the books I’ll Tell You In Person, The Red Zone, and Legs Get Led Astray. Her latest book, the memoir Trying, is out now with Graywolf Press.

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https://www.scrappyliterary.com/

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Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Karen Palmer, author of She’s Under Here, about living with an undercurrent of fear and clawing her way out of abuse. In her memoir, Palmer examines why she ended up trapped, how she escaped, and how she handled the ongoing perils of life constructed around a false identity. She ruthlessly explores the lines between desire and fear, victim and perpetrator, and what it means to make difficult choices as a woman when none of the options are good.

Karen Palmer is a Pushcart Prize winner, with grants from the NEA and the Colorado Council on the Arts. She’s Under Here grew out of her essay, “The Reader is the Protagonist,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and selected by Leslie Jamison for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2017.

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BlueSky

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Dr. Robyn Kozlowitz, author of Post Traumatic Parenting, about using guilt as a teacher, discovering how stress and trauma affect parenting, and creating patterns of joy. Dr. Kozlowitz argues that the best time to rewire our trauma brain is when we are parenting. It gives us an opportunity to heal our inner child through admitting our own damage and not passing it onto our children. By recognizing our trauma, we take the shame away.

Dr. Robyn Koslowitz is a clinical child psychologist and the author of the recently released book Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle, Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. She’s a leading expert on the intersection of trauma and parenting, helping parents understand how both early life experiences and more recent events can shape—and sometimes sabotage—their ability to respond to their children with calm, clarity, and connection.

Her core belief is simple but powerful: Parenting is a skill—and everyone can learn it. If you’re struggling, it’s not because you’re broken. It’s often because trauma has blocked your access to the parenting tools you need. And not only can you learn to parent skillfully after trauma—you can actually heal in the process.

Through her book, podcast, YouTube channel, and the Post-Traumatic Parenting Summit, Dr. K offers practical tools, clinical insight, and deep compassion to help parents move from reactivity to intention.

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Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Michelle Lerner, author of Ring, about defining and treating complicated grief, living with irreparable damage, and finding healing in nature. Ring takes the reader on an unforgettable odyssey through the depths of human emotion, from the hollows of grief to the heights of newfound hope. In the backdrop of a snow-covered sanctuary designed to aid the dying, Lee, a middle-aged non-binary person from the Midwest, grapples with the unbearable weight of losing their young adult daughter. Abandoning their previous life and even the comfort of a longtime spouse, Lee is driven by a quest for closure—or an end to it all.

Michelle Lerner is the author of the novel Ring, published by Bancroft Press, the poetry chapbook Protection, published by Poetry Box and she has had personal essays in publications like Time and The Hill; She’s published poems and other writing in journals such as Shenandoah and VQR. She has an MFA in Poetry from The New School and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Michelle directs the Laura Boss Poetry Foundation and mentors young writers in Gaza through the organization We are Not Numbers. She’s a recovering public interest lawyer currently emerging from late-stage neurological Lyme Disease, living with her family in rural New Jersey.

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Bluesky

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