Community of Writers Podcasts

My guest this week is Irena Smith ,  the author of a defining, or perhaps further defining memoir from a writer, memoirist and raconteur whose storytelling accommodates or contextualizes nearly any circumstance, and bring insight, humor, and welcome complication. In her latest, Smith chronicles an unlikely if completely, joyfully contrived road trip up and down the California coast with her mother...

Anticipating our Summer Workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir, we will be sharing some of our favorite talks from past summers for the next few weeks. This week: 'Three Voices on Voice' a panel from the 2021 Summer Workshops in the Virtual Valley with Dana Johnson, Peter Orner and Andrew Tonkovich.  Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio The views expressed in this program are those of it...

Anticipating our Summer Workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir, we will be sharing some of our favorite talks from past summers for the next few weeks. This week: 'About the About' by Amy Tan.  Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board o...

My guests this week have not made books, they have helped make history. They are academic workers. Yes, this is ostensibly a literary arts show but Bibliocracy often features discussion with activists, teachers, researchers, cultural critics, and historians.  Lately I’ve featured experts on so-called AI in education, and on labor justice in higher education.  Indeed, the motto of my own higher ed...

My guest this week is Lisa K. Richter , who has written an elegant multi-form memoir meets biography, a book constructed in a series of short, impressionist, lyrical recollections and insights, portraits and meditations, all with music in the background and, indeed, in the foreground. In Fly, My Darling , Richter both condenses and expands, simultaneously, on an unlikely love story, one so meaning...

My guest this week in part two of a two-part show is Christopher Mathias , a journalist with a long career of covering the far right, including at HuffPost , The Guardian , MSNBC and Zeteo . His investigative reporting has charted the role of racist and often violent nativist groups like the Proud Boys in the politics and policies of the GOP. He’s out now with a remarkable book titled To Catch a F...

My guest this week is poet Gustavo Hernandez , last on this show to discuss his breakout poetry collection Flower Grand First . He is out now with Bachelor , six dozen short poems, many of which appeared in leading journals, here assembled thanks to FlowerSong press. The poet Diane Seuss, a big fan, helpfully celebrates the conceit of these poems, in which “the speaker moves like a ghost, from aff...

My guest this week is Stephen Cooper , the leading biographer, scholar, and booster of the writer John Fante. He is winner of an NEA for his fiction, a filmmaker, and creative writing teacher at CSULB for many years.  He is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and cowrote and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life an...

My guest this week is Terese Svoboda , author of two dozen books, in addition to short stories, poems, journalism, with work in The Atlantic , Slate , the New Yorker and the Santa Monica Review .  She has won multiple literary prizes, and is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship.  Svoboda has written for and produced documentary film and wrote the libretto for the...

My guest this week is journalist and activist Tracy Rosenthal , author of a terrific long piece at the new issue of a favorite online journal, Hammer & Hope , where they report on ICE raids in Los Angeles by way of the incredible Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU). Rosenthal is a frequent contributor to The New Republic , The Nation , the LA Times and is the author, with Leonardo Vilchis, of Abo...

My guest this week is María Dolores Águila , out now with A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez .  It’s a poetic work of YA historical fiction inspired by the defining early 1930s “Lemon Grove Incident,” a narrative which celebrates a victory over institutionalized racism in San Diego, the struggle for educational equity, and the power of community through a telling from the point o...

I present a performance edition of the show, a recording made at a recent reading hosted by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation .  Thanks to Jimmy Vega, director, and Eric Ahlberg for recording. Playwright Daniel Olivas , poet Adolfo Guzman-Lopez , and short story writer Lisa Alvarez shared their work on a recent Friday night at LA’s longest-running literary and cultural arts venue. Today you’...

A welcome regular on Bibliocracy , my end-of-year 2025 Fund Drive guest is Tom Zoellner , celebrated in a three-part series starting today which features his latest, The Road Was Full of Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War .  This remarkable book researches, reconsiders, and revises the story of slavery’s inevitable end, focusing on a singularly remarkable and game-changing hi...

 My guest is Vishwas Gaitonde, a much-published short story writer out with his debut fiction collection, stories which dramatize, explore, interrogate and celebrate human connection. His On Earth As It Is In Heaven won the 2023 Orison Prize for fiction. About it Margot Livesy wrote “Gaitonde captures the struggle to belong within a family and within a culture, and how language unites and divides...

My guest this week is the writer and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster on his work in helping Monthly Review Press republish the classic Albert Einstein political essay “Why Socialism?”  It’s available now in a gorgeous small book featuring an introduction by Foster and an earlier essay by John J. Simon. Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay explai...

My guest this week is the multi-form writer Daniel Olivas , author of 13 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama including the subject of today’s Bibliocracy Radio , a play titled Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts , from the University of New Mexico Press.  Among other titles, he’s written Chicano Frankenstein: A Novel , and My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love...

My guest this week is poet and prose writer Abby Walthausen, out now with a new poetry collection titled A Swale a Sort of Swaddle , a remarkable collection exploring and celebrating and, importantly, complicating the joys and challenges of domesticity, parenthood, and engagement of our region --- ecosystem, politics, place, history --- with language and the wonder that arrives with a new child. I...

My guest this week is Nicholas Reiner , a poet and teacher and Associate Director of Media & Storytelling at the ACLU of Southern California . As part of Bibliocracy ’s recent series of shows featuring scholars and activists confronting, explaining, and resisting Trumpism and the fascist GOP agenda, I’ve asked Reiner to catch me up on the work of the ACLU of Southern California, and also ask w...

My guest this week is Trevor Griffey . While Bibliocracy Radio is largely devoted to the celebration of book culture and reading, I’ve also frequently and increasingly devoted episodes featuring public policy and political experts, writers, and activists like scholar, teacher, and union advocate Trevor Griffey.  How to respond to this news from the New York Times ? “The American Federation of Teac...

My guest this week is Dr. Nolan Higdon. Today on Bibliocracy Radio I check in again with Nolan Higdon, an activist and scholar on whose perspectives I rely as a result of reading his important work in media literacy and media criticism. Dr. Nolan Higdon is the author of multiple books and articles and academic papers, all with helpfully instructive titles which invite consideration of his analysis...

I’m pleased to host American Library Association President Sam Helmick on the work of that organization and the upcoming ALA Banned Books Week 2025, October 5 - October 11. This year’s theme: “Censorship is so 1984. Read for Your Rights.” Music: Hot Nights by DreamAudio The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Commu...

My guest this week is Robin Romm, author of a breakout 2007 collection of stories, The Mother Garden , a celebrated memoir, The Mercy Papers and, now, a new collection titled Radical Empathy . She’s been awarded an O. Henry Prize in short fiction. Her journalism and nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic , The New York Times , Wired , and Slate . Today she's joining me to read from and discu...

My guest this week is Oscar Villalon , editor in chief of ZYZZYVA journal. Together we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the esteemed West Coast literary journal founded by Howard Junker, and which has printed so much important poetry and prose, art, photography and more. Villalon has lately made big changes to the journal yet kept true to its mission. Oscar Villalon is a journalist and former boo...

My guest this week is poet, prose writer, nature writer and photographer Charles Hood . In his newest book he has written a nature guide, travel adventure and, most movingly, a memoir in scenes of confession and revelation, self-discovery and joy. Out now from Heyday, it’s a collection of 18 essays gathered, with photographs, as Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds: A Sideways Look at the Pacific Ocean...

This week an edited version of readings by two contributors to the latest Santa Monica Review . Taped in front of a live audience at a spring issue launch celebration, writers Stephen D. Gutierrez and Sean Bernard share from their recent work. Gutierrez reads sections from his novella Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand and Bernard reads from his short story “Big Sur,” featured in th...