Get Lit Podcast

Send us Fan Mail This week, we're featuring playwright/actor Harold Pinter and joined by Pinter enthusiast and literature teacher, Brian Hardie! Stories abound as we cover this prolific playwright, his theatre career, political endeavors, and more. Head across the Atlantic with us for this .... .... .... .... riveting... episode! 

Send us Fan Mail Just in time for the school year, we're profiling Lord of the Flies author William Golding! Join us and learn more about this curious author and the even more curious inspirations for his works! We're also going to crash land in an exploration of processing war through literature and the wild circumstances around the 1960's film version of his first novel! 

Send us Fan Mail We've got a back-to-school special episode for you this week: A Brief History of Pencils! We're investigating the origins of this very humble utensil and answering all the questions you never asked! Why are they called 'Number 2' pencils? What's that metal thing at the end called? How is Henry David Thoreau connected to all this? Find out in this month&apo...

Send us Fan Mail We're kicking off our series celebrating authors who were also teachers with Ida B. Wells! Known for her extraordinary activism in the face of hatred and racism, Wells used her powerful voice as a journalist, lecturer, and teacher to advocate for anti-lynching reform, rights for women, and for Black Americans. This week, we celebrate her life and honor her legacy as a critica...

Send us Fan Mail This week, we're back with an episode on the remarkable Mary Chase. Known for her Pulitzer Prize winning play, Harvey, Chase wrote so much more than she gets credit for. She was a groundbreaking journalist, labor activist, children's book author, playwright, and more. Her perspectives are as refreshing as her work - we promise you'll get just as excited about her as...

Send us Fan Mail We're headed way back to the 10th century this week to discuss the incomparable Hrotsvitha! Her plays help us reconsider the ways women were represented in her time (and beyond) and her robust histories and other work provide us an entirely unique perspective on these topics! Also ft. a not so new, newly discovered clue about medieval comedy. 

Send us Fan Mail Jon takes over hosting this week to bring us a biography of acclaimed playwright Noël Coward. Coward wrote some of the most well-known and frequently produced plays in the Western theatre canon. He helped modernize comedy while acting and directing in the West End, Broadway, and Hollywood! Join us for this star-studded, witty episode we hope does him proud! 

Send us Fan Mail This week, we discuss Emily Barrett Browning's husband, Robert Browning! Also a poet and writer, Browning experimented with the dramatic monologue and wrote a variety of compelling work as he traveled and lived around Europe. His progressive beliefs and willingness to live his life in a way that wasn't entirely conventional make him a figure interesting enough to have hi...

Send us Fan Mail We're back for our 3rd Get a Little Lit Episode, just after the 4th of July: The American Revolution in Print! We take a closer look at the role of the printing press, ink, and paper and their roles in the early American colonies! Plus, there's a National Treasure reference...  Research and editing by Get Lit Intern Jack Repak!

Send us Fan Mail This 4th of July, we salute the incredible Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Sedgwick chronicled the voices of those not often represented or heard in America in the 19th century. Her work was wide-ranging in subject and style, and she was among the most prolific women writers of her time! She also prolifically turned down marriage proposals... Like we said, incredible! 

Send us Fan Mail We're celebrating the end of Pride Month with a special episode about the Queer intersections of Zines! Zines (short for magazines) have a rich history in helping amplify the voices of marginalized groups in a physical, immediate, and responsive way. We're featuring the early queer zines of the 1940's (including the watchama-column!), famous zine creators like Ray B...

Send us Fan Mail This week, Dan Esquivel guest stars during Pride month to feature Howard Ashman, the iconic lyricist, playwright, director, and more behind many of our favorite Disney classics. We have Ashman to thank for things like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and even Little Shop of Horrors. We honor his legacy and celebrate the joy he brought and continues to bring to so...

Send us Fan Mail We continue our celebration of Pride Month with Anne Lister - diarist, mountaineer, business woman, travel writer, and of course, lesbian! Lister was the first woman to do many things, including, by many accounts, the first 'same sex' marriage in England. Her preserved and beautifully detailed diaries give us a glimpse into so many facets of life that we may not have oth...

Send us Fan Mail We're kicking off Pride Month with a celebration of Frog & Toad creator Arnold Lobel! Lobel wrote simple, significant works that validated the feelings of children (and adults too!) with his whimsical drawings and wit! We honor his legacy, tragically marred by the AIDS crisis in the 1980's, and celebrate the things he loved most, including his friends - both animal a...

Send us Fan Mail We're ending our exploration of Jewish American Heritage Month with Elie Wiesel. Wiesel's iconic memoir 'Night' is for many, an introduction to the Holocaust. His work as an author, activist, and teacher helped advocate for those whose stories had been ignored. We respect and honor his story and reflect on the role that storytelling plays in keeping us distinct...

Send us Fan Mail Jon takes us all on a JOURNEY through Norman Mailer's life. Mailer was as much of a character as those he wrote. We discuss his colorful life, his Pulitzer Prizes (plural), his wives (also plural), and more! Join us to learn more about this novelist, co-founder of The Village Voice, and boxer(?). 

Send us Fan Mail Need a respite this week? Join us for Nora Ephron whose masterful screenplays capture so much of what we love about love and love about each other. Her career spanned decades as she captured audience's hearts and minds in her essays, articles, movies, plays, and more. Celebrate Nora Ephron's legacy with us, and maybe bring a slice of pie too. 

Send us Fan Mail  IT'S. EMMA. GOLDMAN. This incendiary Jewish icon used her voice to fight for worker's rights, women's independence, access to birth control, prison reform, anarchy, and so much more in a time when the world might not have been ready to hear it. Join us this week to unpack her rather complex legacy and learn about the global impact of her work! 

Send us Fan Mail May is Jewish History Month and we're heading out of Poetry Month with Nelly Sachs, a Jewish poet whose writings serve as a deep and abiding record of the experiences of Holocaust survivors. She won a Nobel Prize for this work, crafting haunting and hopeful messages that have helped generations of communities heal. Join us this week to learn more about her incredible legacy!

Send us Fan Mail Jon takes over for our last week of Poetry Month with Allen Ginsberg! Ginsberg revolutionized the poetry scene and helped define the beat generation for artists and activists. Ginsberg's life is storied and strange so come along for this wild ride across the globe and between the lines! 

Send us Fan Mail This week, another very-important-poet-with-three-names-the-first-of-which-is-Edgar... That's right! It's Edgar Lee Masters. Masters was known for his innovative poetry, specifically, Spoon River Anthology. He challenged the understanding of small town America with his more scandalous writing and put the Midwest on the map as a home for serious Poets. 

Send us Fan Mail We're kicking off our 5th season with an episode on Sara Teasdale - master of lyric poetry, Pulitzer Prize winner, and archeologist of emotions. Teasdale wrote many beautiful works of poetry that were popular during her lifetime, but not always appreciated by critics. We celebrate her life, National Poetry Month, and the inspiration her work provided, long past her death. 

Send us Fan Mail We're celebrating the last episode of our 4th season with a trip to Oz! We're discussing the life of the legendary writer, chicken farmer, playwright, businessman, newspaper man, and theatre artist L. Frank Baum! His books about Dorothy and others in the land of Oz have had a truly sensational impact on pop culture in many forms, most notably, the 1939 film seen by over...

Send us Fan Mail To conclude Women's History Month and kick off National Poetry Month, we're proud to bring you Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop wrote clear and true about the landscapes she experienced and the world around her. She lived a hard life, but wrote with honesty, finding the beauty and elegance in the everyday. Join us in honoring her work and legacy! 

Send us Fan Mail Join us for some tall tales, short tales, and some stories that are truly the stuff of fairy tales as we discuss Elsa Maxwell. Maxwell revolutionized what it meant to throw a good party. She lived deeply and joyfully, celebrating every part of life in the most fantastic ways. She wrote up the social news, music and scripts for films, entertaining guides, and wrote her way into the...