It's the Takeover Episode! The Vulgar Geniuses were invited to Rollins College to host a live recording at the Rollins Museum of Art in September of this year. Joined on the stage by five of Rollins' most talented voices, Dennie & Veronica speak with the young, up-and-coming writers about their love for the craft of writing.

Pull out pen and paper to take notes because school is in session! Fatima Sani, Angelisse Perez, Asha Budhai, Isabel Palanco, and Zaria Clark will be your instructors this evening as we all learn how to leave a stage in ashes! Stick around for extra credit when the Vulgar Geniuses find themselves in the interview chair with questions from the audience.

Aaliyah Bilal's TEMPLE FOLK is a captivating short story collection devoted to showing Black Muslims pursuing a life full of desire necessary to reaching one's own truth. This debut serves as a compelling means for America to recognize and acknowledge the historical significance of Black Muslims within the country's tapestry.

Bilal's origin story in the publishing world is like nothing we've ever heard. She shares with us how Temple Folk received a book deal before she even had an agent after taking a chance on a tweet from a young, up-and-coming senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Bilal also talks to us about the inspiring works of Edward P. Jones and the tearful full-circle moment when her work was met with his praise.

Myriam Gurba invites us to give a critical eye to those who lurk in the darkness and the villains that walk untouchable in broad daylight with her recent essay collection, CREEP: ACCUSATIONS AND CONFESSIONS. This poignant look at historical figures thrown in the media spotlight with their heinous crimes while their victims are left forgotten in the shadows. Gurba asks readers to take a step back, and search for the things left unsaid about the women whose lives were erased from the narrative.

We sit down with Gurba to talk about the multitudes of the word "creep" and how we all have the potential of finding ourselves in moments of participating in creep-like behavior. She also shares her desire to include Santa Maria, California within the literary canon and her undying love for the The Real Housewives franchise.

From takedowns to chokeholds, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a martial art practice that comprises over a thousand technique moves to push one's opponent into a state of submission. In Rolling: A Ladies' Guide to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, author Melanie Farmer captures readers as she explains this physical art form and braids it with the evolution of her relationship with her mother in a hilarious introspection of her life.   

The newest release from Burrow Press explores the dichotomy of gender as it relates to a male-dominated space. We sit down with Melanie to talk about her chapbook, the choice of creating a nonfiction collection in the second person, and how this collection of essays found its way into the hands of Colson Whitehead.  

SHE IS A HAUNTING is an engrossing coming-of-age novel from Trang Thanh Tran. While visiting her estranged father in Vietnam as a guise to reconnect, Jade Nguyen's main objective is to get the money needed for her to attend college in the Fall. Her father has enlisted her help to build a website for a potential bed & breakfast as he renovates a French colonial house. However, the house has other ideas and will do everything in its power to keep Jade and her family from leaving. We speak to Tran about the dream that inspired this novel and creating a character that lives on the tightrope of duality while holding the secret of their sexuality and struggling with their cultural identity.

This past April, visual artist Anthony Darby wowed audiences with the closing of his first solo gallery exhibit, "Familiar Faces," at the SoWhat art gallery in Orlando, Florida. Darby's work was a wall-to-wall installation of faces drawn throughout the gallery. These portraits, inspired by the usage of Near Eastern and Ancient Egyptian techniques used in art, beckoned art goers to be pulled in to see the similarities that we all share when stripped down to our eyes, noses, and smiles.

Queens, New York native and Florida-raised artist Darby, sits down to talk about how he stumbled upon the art world, his current obsession with faces, and what he desires for the future of art.

Drawing from his own experiences as a refugee from Vietnam, Young Vo brilliantly weaves a tale that has resonated with children of all backgrounds in his book Gibberish. We are introduced to Dat, a young boy who has traveled to a new country to start a new life and is met with a new and very confusing language that sounds a lot like gibberish. But when he meets a peculiar character named Julie, Dat's world begins to unfold. In this episode, Young discusses the desire for children to recognize the power that comes when one can make genuine connections with others from different cultures and backgrounds. He also talks about the real-life "Julie" and his chance meeting with Arthur A. Levine that changed his life.

No matter where he resides, for Jamil Jan Kochai, Logar will always be home. And it is Logar that he returns to for a second time in his award-winning short story collection "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak." This book carries readers through Afghanistan with beautifully complex stories of multidimensional family lines and friendships that must find a way to breathe between the lines of war.

Through magical realism, Kochai writes of a young man unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy as he plays a game of Call of Duty. And a teacher who suddenly morphs into a monkey after losing his connection to his religion. We also talk about his favorite MF Doom album and if he dons his National Book Award Finalist medallion as he shops for eggs at the local grocery store.

We kick off the second half of our podcast season with our first live recording with a packed house at Stardust Video & Coffee in Orlando, Fl. We celebrate our third anniversary with the first in the Midnight Marauders Story Hour series. For this show, we bring to the stage four of Florida's most brilliant writers for a live reading, and of course, they all take turns in the hot seat chair. Brianna Johnson, Vulgar Geniuses alum Michelle Lizet Flores, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, and Ryan Rivas join us on the stage. Grab your favorite cup of joe, and get settled in for an hour of the Vulgar Geniuses Podcast live at Stardust!

Fatimah Asghar shows us the many faces of sisterhood when tested by the constant waves of grief and neglect in their debut novel When We Were Sisters. Kausar, Alisha, and Noreen are suddenly orphans after the murder of their father and the death of their mother years prior. Their uncle takes the girls away from the only home they've ever known and forces them to grow up in a run-down apartment abandoned for weeks and sometimes without food and adult supervision.

We mark the end of our second literary year with our interview with Fatimah as they speak about the creative format of centering this story around the girls, while leaving the adults nameless and, at times, redacted. They also share what it was like to approach this story of grief during the early years of lockdowns and what it means to give one's self the permission to create beyond the limitations of others.