Awakeners

To kick off the third season of Awakeners, Lena speaks with poets Dorianne Laux and Arielle Hebert, who connected when Arielle joined the MFA program at North Carolina State University. We review Dorianne and Arielle’s poetic lineages, with special attention to Dorianne’s close ties to (and beautiful, hilarious stories about) Philip Levine and Sharon Olds. In the second half of the episode, we div...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena speaks with the poets Gabrielle Bates and Keetje Kuipers, who met when Gabby enrolled in Keetje’s poetry class at Auburn University in Alabama almost thirteen years ago. According to Gabby, she thought all poets were dead, so Keetje’s class was a revelation. They read Richard Siken, Terrance Hayes, A.E. Stallings, and Dorianne Laux, Keetje’s own mentor. They beg...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena speaks with the nonfiction writers Tajja Isen and Nicole Chung, who became colleagues and friends after working together on an essay for Catapult , a (now sadly shuttered) digital magazine where Nicole served as editor. After collaborating to publish Tajja’s essay, Nicole brought Tajja onto the magazine’s editorial staff, and eventually Tajja succeeded Nicole as...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena speaks with the poets Carl Phillips and Aditi Machado, who met through the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis when Aditi began as a student almost fifteen years ago. Growing up in India, Aditi wasn’t exposed to much American poetry. Carl could tell, reading her work, that this was a singular voice—he even remembers thinking to himself that Aditi’s...

On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the novelists Tash Aw and Jemimah Wei, who connected when Jemimah signed up for Tash’s fiction master class on “time and place” in Singapore back in 2015.  Growing up in Malaysia and Singapore, Tash and Jemimah remember having almost no models for what it might look like to be a writer. The publishing industry – and the literary world – seemed to be h...

On the first episode of Season 2 of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the writers Melissa Febos and Lydi Conklin, who met at the MacDowell artist residency back in 2011.  Melissa had just published Whip Smart , her first book, a propulsive memoir about her experience working as a professional dominatrix in a dungeon in New York. Lydi was still an MFA student when they met Melissa—this was back when MacD...

On this special bonus episode of Awakeners , Lena speaks with writer Tiana Clark about the person who first told her she was a poet: her late mentor and high school teacher, Mr. Bill Brown. Tiana was a rebellious teenager. “They’re talking about you in the teacher’s lounge,” Mr. Brown warned her once. But instead of punishing Tiana for acting out, Mr. Brown gifted her the poetry of Rita Dove, Li-Y...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena chats with writers T Bambrick and Jane Miller, who were connected by some fellow poets in Tucson when T found themselves at a crossroads in their writing. Jane had just retired from teaching (for the first time), but they began to meet regularly over brunch to talk about—well, everything.  We discuss the advice from Jane that helped T write their first book, a s...

On this episode of Awakeners, Lena gets temporarily inducted into a writing group called the Firefeet by writers Emily Alford, Charlie Beckerman, CJ Hauser and Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, who have been keeping their “feet to the fire”—in other words, keeping weekly goal-setting and accountability email threads—for the past ten years. The four connected through the graduate programs in creative writing...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena chats with poets Adrian Matejka and Austin Araujo. Austin was already a huge fan of Adrian’s work—especially his collection The Big Smoke , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—when he applied to study with him at Indiana University’s MFA program. Austin assisted Adrian with an undergrad class on the poetics of rap, and Adrian served on Austin’s thesis committee, w...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena chats with the writers Kyoko Mori and Abi Newhouse, who worked together at George Mason University’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. We discuss the evolution of Abi’s essay collection about growing up Mormon, including her experience leaving the Mormon Church during and after the MFA. We also cover ambivalence in personal narrative, the difference between co...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena chats with poets Rick Barot and Brian Teare, who met at Stanford University as young writers and have collaborated for over twenty years. We discuss Brian’s first fingerprint on Rick’s body of work, the triumphs and failures of mentorship they experienced in institutions of higher ed, their approaches to ekphrasis (i.e. creative work that responds to a work of a...

On this episode of Awakeners , Lena chats with writers Leslie Jamison and Emmeline Clein. Clein studied with Jamison at Columbia University’s MFA program, and the pair published their most recent books—Jamison’s memoir, Splinters, and Clein’s debut essay collection, Dead Weight —the very same week back in February 2024. We discuss what they’re working on right now, what they talked about on their...

This is Awakeners , a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Host Lena Crown interviews pairs of writers, artists, critics, and scholars who matter to one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence (think feedback letters, margi...