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

Stanley Ridgley is an author, educator, and former military intelligence officer. He served for five years in West Berlin, where he received the George S. Patton Award in Leadership. His degrees include a Doctorate and a Masters in international relations from Duke University and an international MBA from Temple University. He’s also studied at Moscow State University and the Institut de Gestion S...

Susan Kougell is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Her solo films can be rented at the Filmmakers’ Co-Op and are screening internationally, and her six short films with Ernie Marrero are held in MoMA’s permanent collection and archives. She is also a classically trained violist and has combined her passion for music and poetry in her choral texts and compositions. She teaches at Purchase Coll...

Jennifer Griffith is a musician and composer whose vocal and instrumental works are inspired by politics, social issues, and human relationships. She earned her PhD in composition at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has written and performed jazz, classical music, and opera around the world. William Gadea is an author, animator, entrepreneur. In 2012, he founded IdeaRocke...

Mary Simmons is a queer poet from Cleveland, Ohio. Her first collection, Mother, Daughter, Augur, was published by June Road Press in October of 2025. She’s also placed work in  The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, trampset, Moon City Review, Variant Lit, The Shore , and elsewhere. Mary earned her MFA from Bowling Green State University, where she also served as managing editor of  The Mid-American Revi...

Charles Ritchie has been drawing, journaling, and painting in watercolors from his studio window in Silver Spring, Maryland for 40 years. Many of his drawings and watercolors are palimpsests created over decades, comprised of overlapping images of his suburban neighborhood captured at various times throughout the day and year. Key themes in his work include light, time, and dreams.    Charles hold...

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir  Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City  and two collections of poetry,  How to Not Be Afraid of Everything  and  Overpour . She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, Ucross, M...

Laurie Sheck is the author of three novels and five collections of poems, which have been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Review, as well as numerous essays, which have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Cullman Center F...

Abhishek Pandit is a jack of all trades: a coder, a novelist, a playwright, and a globetrotter with a passion for languages and cultural syncretism. In this episode, he joins us to discuss his musical  Earth Icon,  which braids together themes including climate change, emergent technologies, displacement, motherhood, and home in a dynamic portrait of a Puerto Rican family living in Missouri. Also...

Rebecca Macijeski is a poet, editor, and educator. She’s published two collections,  Autobiography  and  Apocryphal Girl , and holds a PhD in English with a focus in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoc...

Tamara Nemirovsky is an award-winning filmmaker and professor of film studies at the University of South Florida. In this episode, we discuss her 2023 documentary Second Chances, which follows the harrowing journeys of four individuals striving to recover from addiction in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, before touching on the equally harrowing challenges of balancing the demands of life, acad...

Spencer Sutton studied art and religion at Connecticut College and now lives, works, and creates in Brooklyn. In this episode, we discuss the intersection of art, mythology, modernity, faith, and the hero’s journey as it maps onto everyday life. 

Crisosto Apache is a poet and Associate Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design. Originally from the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, Crisosto is Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné of the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. Their books include  Genesis,  which retraces the fraught history of conflicts between the United States and First...

Kathryn Trueblood is a novelist, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, Professor of English at Western Washington University, and faculty member of The Red Badge Project, which serves active-duty soldiers and veterans in Washington through storytelling. Her work is firmly situated in the medical humanities and has won the Rico Award in Prose, the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and the Red Hen Pr...

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. He is the author of two novels,  The Oracle of Stamboul  and  The Last Watchman of Old Cairo , as well as a contributor to the  The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Ge...

Michele Reale is an author, librarian, ethnographer, and editor of two literary magazines, Ovunque Siamo and Red Fern Review. She holds three master’s degrees—in English, Library Sciences, and creative writing, respectively—and teaches at Arcadia University. Her academic interests include, but are not limited to, poetry, library science, contemporary Italian-American writing, and the intersection...

* For more on this topic, check out this post on The DateKeepers blog: https://www.thedatekeepers.com/post/what-is-a-book-coach-and-do-you-need-one What is book coaching? What sorts of writers hire book coaches? What kind of working relationship can you expect to have with your book coach? And do you really need one?  In this episode, we discuss these questions and more, share our firsthand experi...

Luis Quijano is a pioneering designer-scientist and Fulbright scholar with one foot in the sciences and the other in the arts. We discuss his work with bacterial cellulose and other biological materials, which is rapidly redefining the fashion industry, as well as the joys and challenges of operating at the intersection between divergent disciplines. If you’re open to collaborating on projects in...

Laurence Warner makes music (for the internet) and teaches tech (in real life). Since 2020, when he finished a Fulbright Scholarship on smartphone independence and returned to his roots in smalltown England, he’s released a concept album every year, culminating in 2024's *Ctrl-Alt-Rap*: 10 diss tracks vs. Big Tech. His songs have been played on BBC Radio & venues from the Railway Inn to Ox...

Joanne Mulcahy is an essayist, biographer, anthropologist, folklorist, and educator. Her four books run the gamut from the art of travel writing to traditional healing practices in Alaska and Mexico. In this episode, she shares stories from the classroom and the field and discusses her latest project: unearthing painter Marion Greenwood’s forgotten yet remarkable artistic legacy. 

There's no such thing as a human without a story. You're no exception. You just may not know how to tell it. In this episode, we discuss the challenges you'll face before ever putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), and how to overcome them. For more, check out this post on our blog: https://www.thedatekeepers.com/post/you-ve-got-a-book-in-you