Let's Have a Renaissance: The DateKeepers Podcast with Itto and Mekiya Outini

Tom Levy is a London-based painter. He holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and has shown paintings in museums and galleries in the US and the UK, including at the UN building. In this episode, we discuss his artistic practice and preoccupations, and he offers a word of advice to others who, like him, are reeling from a terrible loss.  

Derrick Austin is a poet and ekphrastic writer with two poetry collections published and a third in progress, all with BOA Editions. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a Cave Canem fellow, an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, a winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and a winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, among others. In this episode, we discuss his jour...

Jeremy Podgursky’s compositions synthesize a deep awareness of the classical canon with sensibilities shaped while playing in indie rock bands, and his music has earned support from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation Commission, the Copeland House Residency, the Mizzou New Music Festival, and elsewhere. In this episode, Jeremy shares how his persistent struggle ag...

Brendan Isaac Jones is an author, father, husband, Fulbright scholar, and MacDowell fellow. His first novel,  The Alaskan Laundry , was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and his second,  Whispering Alaska , by Penguin Random House. He’s now at work on a memoir about his Fulbright year in Siberia. In this episode, we discuss the memoir, the difference between provincialism and parochialism, a...

Joyce Kozloff’s career as a visual artist spans decades, during which her work has explored preoccupations including cartography, women, the decorative arts, and war. She’s created numerous public and transit art installations and received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation,...

A former division-one athlete and musician, Jeff Bender now writes fiction, comedy, and screenplays. He earned his MFA from Columbia University, and his work has appeared in The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, Guernica, The Offing, and elsewhere. He’s also received support from residencies including the Edward F. Albee Foundation and Jentel, among others. In this episode, we discuss his current projects...

Timothy Nolan is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, actor, and educator. He earned his MFA in playwriting at Pace University and has been named an Indie Theater New Person of the Year. He now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, screenwriter Susannah Nolan. In this episode, we talk about ghosts: what they are, where they come from, how they differ from memories, what they tell us about ourselv...

What if someone in your family is a monster? In this episode, we read one of our stories, “The Bghlt el-Kaboor,” originally published in  Afritondo  and inspired by a popular Moroccan folktale, which explores this very question. 

Emma Binder has published short fiction in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Indiana Review, The Best American Short Stories , and elsewhere and has received support from The Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, The Anderson Center, and Writing by Writers. In this episode, we discuss Emma’s latest literary venture, a novel-in-progress, as well as the narrative elements you need to hook readers and keep...

Robert Ray Morgan is the author of dozens of novels, biographies, short stories, and poetry collections, including the bestsellers Gap Creek: A Novel and Boone: A Biography . Born in 1944 on a farm in rural North Carolina, he went on to teach for fifty-one years at Cornell University and earn heavyweight honors including a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. In this...

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is an award-winning poet and visual artist. She’s published collections with independent presses across the US, and her work has appeared in prestigious journals including  Poetry, Prairie Schooner , and  The North American Review . She’s also edited the print journal  Quercus  and the online publication  Perihelion , and she’s now a member of the National Book Critics Circle. I...

William Wallace Rose is a writer, poet, actor, traveler, printmaker, educator, and translator. He’s taught drama in Switzerland, creative writing in the US, and English as a foreign language in the Czech Republic, and his work has been supported by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He now lives in France, where he’s immersed in the ancient regional language Occitan. In this episode, we discuss the c...

Abeer Hoque is a writer, poet, photographer, traveler, and educator. Born in Nigeria to Bangladeshi parents, she moved to the US when she was 13 and has since traversed much of the world, drawing on various media to document what she’s seen. In this episode, she shares her thoughts on the relationship between text and image and how her transnational perspective has informed her artistic practice,...

Boris Fishman is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and one memoir. His journalism has appeared in  The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian , and elsewhere. He’s taught at Princeton University, the University of Montana, and most recently the University of Austin. In this episode, we discuss the complex relationship between fiction and journalism and the...

Ashley Wren Collins is a director, choreographer, producer, actor, and author of five books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her indie feature film  Changing Taste  won Best Comedy in the 2013 Burbank International Film Festival and the 2014 Manhattan Film Festival, her choreography for the smash hit musical  Foxy Ladies Love Boogie 70s Explosion  was lauded as “sensational” by  Discover Hollywood ,...

Hailed by The New Yorker as an “unusually inventive composer” and “innovative [harpist],” Anne LeBaron has spent her long career pushing the boundaries of opera and pioneering new forms of collaborative, grassroots, comic, and electronic composition. Her work has garnered widespread critical acclaim and has been supported by the Fulbright, MacDowell, the Copeland Center, and many other foundations...

Matthew Dunivan is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, teacher, and jack of all trades. The son of a drywall installer with no college degree, he beat the odds by earning an MFA from Columbia University in New York—all because God didn’t promptly answer his adolescent prayers. In this episode, he shares his journey, and we address one of the most pressing questions of our age: is it harder to get a t...

Julian Kreimer is an artist, critic, educator, and chair of the MFA program in Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase College. His work has been supported by the MacDowell foundation and others, shown in galleries around the US, and reviewed in publications including  Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Artcritical . In this episode, we discuss strategies to help artists balance their creative practices with...

Eric ‘Wally’ Wallach is a playwright, bike dancer, and innovator committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional theatrical forms in pursuit of human connection and spiritual rejuvenation. In this episode, we discuss what makes a good play, what’s wrong with modern theater, and how it can be revitalized, and Wally walks us through one of his most experimental projects, Flight 18, conceived as a...

In this episode, we read one of the first stories we wrote together, “To the Island and Halfway Back,” originally published in  Sortes .

Joel Hoffman’s classical compositions draw from a wide range of sources, including Eastern European folk music, Chinese traditional music, and bebop. He holds degrees from the University of Wales and Juilliard and has received awards from the MacDowell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Music Center, and others. In this episode, we discuss the creative benefits of life a...

Reena Shah is an author, a traveler, a public schoolteacher, a former dancer, a Steinbeck fellow, and a Fulbright scholar. In this episode, we discuss the circuitous development of her debut novel,  Every Happiness , what publishing with Bloomsbury taught her, and how she learned to stop worrying and let her characters take the lead. 

Gabriel Jason Dean is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His productions for adults and children have been performed on and off Broadway and have garnered extensive critical acclaim. He currently teaches English Literature and Creative Writing and Theater at Muhlenberg College, where he’s in the process of creating a major in musical theater. In this episode, we discuss Gabriel’s favori...

David Biespiel is a poet, critic, memoirist, novelist, and painter. His work has earned many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He currently leads graduate poetry workshops at Oregon State University. In today’s episode, he shares lessons collected over many decades in the arts, discusses the critical role...

Hugo dos Santos is a Luso-American writer, poet, and translator. Born in Lisboa, Portugal, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, he investigates questions of diaspora, memory, and belonging in his fiction and poetry, while in his translations he strives to bring the best contemporary Portuguese literature to English-speaking audiences. In this episode, we discuss his approach to literary translation a...