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

Laura Goode is the author of several books, most recently Pitch Craft: The Writer’s Guide to Getting Agented, Published, and Paid , developed from material that she teaches at Stanford University. In this episode, we discuss her formative influences, how the MFA system failed her, and how she learned to level up, start thinking of herself as a professional, and build a sustainable career.

Elizabeth Johnson is an artist and writer whose creative practice is fueled by a passion for highlighting the work of her peers and an enduring interest in chaos. In this episode, we discuss her creative process, the influence of her background in science and mathematics, her recurring preoccupations, and how she launched her career as an art writer, and she shares her perspective on where the art...

Scott Pinkmountain is a writer, musician, and host and producer of multiple podcasts, including  Make/Work , which was developed by  The Rumpus . His work has earned support from the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Meet the Composer, and others. In this episode, we discuss his many creative outlets, and he shares insights drawn from a long career and countless conversations w...

Fran Siegel’s drawings, tapestries, and installations can be viewed at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Yale University Art Gallery, The Morgan Library Museum in NYC, the Los Angeles County Museum, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by the Bogliasco Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and others. In this episode, we discuss her creative proc...

Danica Novgorodoff is a visual artist, writer, and MacDowell Fellow. Meera Subramanian is a journalist specializing in environmental issues and climate change. For years, they’ve been collaborating on a graphic novel about youth climate action,  A Better World Is Possible . In this episode, they discuss their collaborative process and the innovative structure that they adopted to accommodate a com...

Peter Campion is a poet, a Pushcart Prize winner, and a professor at the University of Minnesota. He serves as Executive Editor of Unbound Press and as Editor in Chief of the literary magazine  Revel . In this episode, he discusses his lifelong love of poetry, visual art and music, shares insights gleaned from both sides of the editor’s desk, and advises submitters on when to send out work and whi...

Sean Behrens is a Brooklyn-based playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His work plumbs the depths of a wide range of social phenomena, often leveraging experimental techniques and applying the lens of the absurd. In this episode, we discuss the history of drama and storytelling, the ways in which various genres and media can cross-pollenate and enrich one another, and the ongoing literary conve...

Laura Hulthen Thomas is an award-winning author and head of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. Her work has appeared in  Witness, Epiphany, Summerset Review, failbetter, The /tƐmz/ Review, the Cimarron Review , and elsewhere. In this episode, she offers a sneak peak of her forthcoming novel and shares lessons learned from publishing a li...

Yaram Yahu is the author of  My Afro is a Rising Sun , out with Running Press Kids, an imprint of Hachette, in 2024. He’s now working on several other picture books and a novel for adults and developing screenplays for television. In this episode, we discuss the importance of market research and the intricacies of the children’s picture book market, and he shares tested strategies for overcoming b...

In this episode, we read one of our short stories, “Ten Years,” originally published in  Modern Literature , a work of speculative fiction that examines the toll that societal pressures and generational trauma can take on the body and mind and asks what happens when your own country leaves you behind. We follow the reading with a discussion of these themes and share the story behind this story: ho...

David Crespy is a playwright, biographer, and scholar. He’s the founder and co-director of Mizzou’s Writing for Performance Program, and he’s played an instrumental role in establishing and shaping the trajectories of many other programs, including the Missouri Playwright’s Workshop, the Mizzou New Play Series, and Summer Rep’s Comedy in Concert Series. His latest projects include a late-career bi...

In addition to his day job as a semiconductors analyst, Wesley is a Fulbright scholar, a seasoned traveler, and a storyteller. Most recently, he’s set out to try his hand at travel writing. In this episode, he makes a powerful case for the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, and we trade embarrassing stories from Togo, India, and Uzbekistan. 

Michael Wendroff is the son of an editor, the stepson of a literary agent, and most recently the author of a debut political thriller,  What Goes Around . In this episode, we discuss the hurdles one must overcome to polish, market, and sell a novel in the contemporary market. 

Dipika Mukherjee is a writer and traveler. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School of the University of Chicago, writes a literary column for  The Edge of Malaysia , and has published eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In this episode, we discuss how her background in sociolinguistics enriches her fiction, why she chose to write in English, the role of the writer in t...

Armand Rosamilia has written and published over 200 stories, including crime thrillers, supernatural thrillers, zombies, contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and more. In this episode, he shares some of the insights he’s gleaned from a long career in writing and publishing, including the red flags he’s learned to look out for in publishing contracts. 

Together, we write fiction about America, Morocco, and migrants from all walks of life. In this episode, we read and discuss three of our short stories, “The Rain Is Falling on Tangier" (originally published in Aura Literary Arts Review), “The New Sufyan" (originally published in "Gargoyle Magazine), and “A Scientific Mind" (originally published in DarkWinter Magazine), each of which dives into a...

Virginia Wagner is a visual artist and writer whose work takes place in zones of conflict between nature and human construction. She’s received commissions from Guggenheim Works & Process and  National Geographic  as well as fellowships from several residencies, and she’s a founding editor of the online journal  Painters on Painting , alongside Julie Heffernan. In this episode, she shares how...

Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She earned her MFA in creative writing from NYU in 2021 and her BA in English from Cornell in 2019. She speaks English, Spanish, Italian, and a little bit of Russian and currently lives with her partner in Mexico City. In this episode, we discuss the joys of multilingual partnerships, the fascinating challenges of writing in a foreig...

JD Adler has been an EMT, a bartender, a ski lift operator, a bookstore manager, a cook, a reporter, a librarian, a haunted pub crawl guide, and a vagabond. He holds an MA in communication, writes poetry, fiction, and journalism, gives performances as an oral storyteller with the Suncoast Storytellers, and runs his own publishing platform. In this episode, we discuss how written and oral tradition...

Douglas Boyce teaches music at George Washington University and writes compositions that draw heavily on medieval and renaissance traditions while integrating modernist aesthetics. He holds a PhD in composition from the University of Pennsylvania, and his awards include a residency at MacDowell. In this episode, we discuss the power of enstrangement, highlight the parallels between avant garde cha...

After spending twenty years as an educator, Susan Carlisle joined a writing group and started penning romance novels. She hasn’t looked back since. She’s now published dozens of books, many with Harlequin, an imprint of HarperCollins. In this episode, we discuss the art of the romance novel, the importance of writing communities, how the publishing industry is evolving, how to make a perfect cucum...

Siavash Golkar is an NYC-based visual artist, physicist, and neuroscientist whose work interrogates the economics of social exchange. His paintings render impossible anatomies—a head replaced by a human hand; a torso split open, revealing a hollow interior; a mouth disembodied—highlighting the clash between internal pretenses and superficial interactions.    In this episode, we discuss how we, as...

After serving on the editorial staff of  The New York Review of Books  from 1988 to 2017 and founding the literary magazine  Little Star , Ann Kjellberg launched her own Substack newsletter,  Book Post , which she describes as “a bite-sized, newsletter-based book review delivery service.” In this episode, Ann shares stories from her long career, and we pick her brain about book reviews—why they ma...

Kai Franz is an artist with a background in computer science and architecture. For the past five years, he’s been collaborating with a machine he designed and built called the Dual-Axis Precision Deposition System—or plopper. The plopper primarily fabricates sculptures, but also produces prints, drawings, and films. Kai describes it as “the bad conscience of formal idealism.” This is but one of hi...

Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and high school English teacher. Her first collection of poetry,  None but Witches , offers a series of reflections on the women in Shakespeare’s plays and female experiences present and past. She is also the author of a chapbook,  My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties , and she’s now working on poems about Marie Antoinette and the end of the world.    In this episode, we...