First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction. His new novel is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. We ta...

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships including Cave Canem, Kimbilio, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New Yor...

David van den Berg grew up hunting and fishing in the Florida swamps. He studied anthropology, religion, and archaeology at Rollins College before moving to Los Angeles to work as an actor. He has a J.D. and a Master of Laws in Taxation from Loyola Law School. He’s the founder of Prometheus Dreaming, a digital literary journal. His poetry collection is called Love Letters from an Arsonist. We talk...

Roger Reeves earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays; Best Barbarian; and King Me, winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. In this episode we discuss the hush harbors where enslaved individuals found quiet and opportunities for ecstasy, why writing...

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA and elsewhere. Jenny Qi received her Ph. D. in Biomedical Science (Cancer Biology) from UCSF. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling. Also a translator from French and Polish, her co-translations with Piotr Sommer of Jerzy Ficowski's Everything I Don't Know received the PEN Award for Best Book of Poetry in Translation in 2022. Her poems have appeared in five volumes of the annual Best American Poetry series and have been published in venues such a...

Luis Alberto Urrea was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction The Devil’s Highway. He is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among...

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels translated into thirty-five languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. Trust,...

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards, and has been translated into many languages. Learn more abou...

Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where he received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He lives in Norwich, United Kingdom. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is his first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Graver is the author of five novels, including Kantika, which was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul, and whose life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and New York. Her fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book...

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between C...

Michelle Brafman is the author of the short story collection Bertrand Court and the novels Washing the Dead and Swimming with Ghosts. She taught creative writing at the George Washington University, the New Directions Writing Program, and the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program. She founded Yeah Write, a writing coaching business. She lives in the Washington, DC area. Learn more about your ad choi...

TC Boyle is the author of 30 books of fiction including most recently, Blue Skies, The Harder They Come, The Terranauts, The Relive Box, Outside Looking In, and Talk To Me. He received a Ph. D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam i...

T.J. Newman is a former bookseller and flight attendant whose first novel, Falling, became a publishing sensation and debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was named a best book of the year by USA Today, Esquire, and Amazon, among many others, and has been published in more than thirty countries. The book will soon be a major motion picture from Universal Pictures....

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include of Boss Grady’s Boys, The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo, The Pride Parnell Street, and Dallas Sweetman. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side, The Te...

Mona Simpson is the best-selling author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and an award from the American Academy...

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of six novels: Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, Eligible, and Rodham. Her first story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, was published in 2018 and picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. Her books have been selected by The New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, opti...

Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. He received the Heinz Award in 2...

Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok. His collection is called Welcome Me to the Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ann Lauterbach is the author of ten books of poetry and three books of essays, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience and The Given & The Chosen, her 2009 collection, Or To Begin Again, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lauterbach’s work has been recognized by fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foun...

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days, which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the short story collection The Disappeared. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Porter is currently a Profes...

Cathleen Schine is the author of the 12 novels including The Love Letter and Rameau’s Niece, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, and The Grammarians. Her new novel is called Künstlers in Paradise. In addition to novels, she has written articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. She grew...

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New Yo...

Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River —named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant, All Back Full, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. His novel-in-stories is called, A Better Class Of People. His new nonfiction book is called Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere. He teaches at Stony Brook University and has previously tau...