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“If writing has rules, they are exactly the same as the rules of living.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Rachel Cusk reads from her latest novel, Parade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and talks about her approach to writing, which includes focusing on the interplay of instinct, discipline, and authenticity.
In this Poetry.LA video, Altadena co-poets laureate Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar read a selection of their poems and speak about how the Eaton Fire has affected their lives and community. Lennon and Sarwar were recently awarded a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets to launch their poetry project “After the Fires: Healing from Histories.”
“She was a short story that kind of got too big and started rolling away from me,” says Katie Yee about her debut novel, Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books, 2025), in this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, in which they discuss writing outside of your own experience and usual style.
In this Daily Show interview, author Rob Franklin speaks about the themes of race, class, and privilege in his debut novel, Great Black Hope (Summit Books, 2025), with host Josh Johnson.
In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers discusses the themes of Blackness, intersectionality, and diaspora in her essay collection, Misbehaving at the Crossroads (Harper, 2025), and how it serves as a companion piece to her novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021).
In this 2009 Granta interview, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his early life and his memoir Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Pantheon, 2010) with Ellah Allfrey. Ngũgĩ died at the age of eighty-seven on May 28, 2025.
“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.
“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.
For this Straits Times video, Korean author Baek Se-hee and translator Anton Hur reflect on the global success and universal resonance of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) and discuss the current state of mental health in East Asian countries in their first joint interview.
“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.
