The Perks Of Being A Book Lover Podcast

We saw this week’s guest in early fall at Carmichael’s Bookstore when she read aloud from her latest book, Don’t Call Me a Hurricane. Ellen Hagan has roots in Kentucky and is part of Spalding University’s low residency MFA faculty but lives and works in New York City. She is a poet, fiction writer, performer, and teacher for several programs including the The DreamYard Project and the Internationa...

To close out October this week, we chat with Lee Mandelo, author of Summer Sons, which recently went into paperback. This creepy novel is hard to categorize because it’s queer Southern Gothic, dark academia, and ghost story. It also touches on issues of race and class. The book is an amalgam of a lot of different ideas rolled into a complex story of friendship, grief, and family curses. We’re so g...

We are halfway through spooky October and maybe you are looking for a good scary book to read. Our guest today, Johann Trotter, can give you some tips. Johann lives in Northern Ireland and works as a scientific researcher. But her hobby gone wild is horror in all its forms. She is a self-professed horror junkie. She is a bit obsessed with Stephen King, but on her instagram page @ jobis89 , you can...

Many book lovers could spend hours in a library wandering around perusing the shelves, but the Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana is a little more unique because it houses not only books and magazines but some spooky residents. In the 1930s, staff members and patrons first started seeing apparitions including a woman in Victorian clothing named The Gray Lady, a gentleman named Frank, and a lit...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Tyler Miller, founder of Reluctant Reader Books, a company that makes books for kids who hate to read. He is also author to several books for young readers in the Nevermore series, including We Bury the Living. In our conversation, Tyler tells us about why he started Reluctant Reader Books and how these books pull in younger readers who don’t normally find book...

This week’s show gave us an opportunity to speak to Erin Keane, who is the editor in chief of Salon.com but also a well-known Louisville writer who has recently published a book that defies classification a bit—it is a family memoir, but it is also an examination of history and culture. Erin’s book, Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, covers a lot of ground. While it is based on her mother’s...

Our show this week is for people who love music….or even just like music. And it doesn’t matter what type of music you like so long as you like it. Our guest is Susan Rogers, a professor at Berklee College of Music who holds a PhD in psychology. But before she was a professor, she was a staff engineer and record producer for artists such as Prince, Barenaked Ladies, and David Byrne, making her one...

We love finding book lovers who are doing innovative things with words. This week we are talking about making poetry fun and accessible to the person on the street, literally. Our guest is Sean Petrie, a poet in Austin, Texas who, along with his fellow poets in the group Typewriter Rodeo makes poetry become a sensory experience. Sean and his colleagues Jodi, David, and Kari Anne click their vintag...

One of our guests from this past summer, Kate Wickers, introduced us to the work of British nonfiction writer Ben Aitken. His books are funny, intelligent, poignant and we’re thrilled he agreed to speak with us from his home in London. We chatted with him about his many books, particularly The Marmalade Diaries which was just published in the US in June. Ben is funny in that understated way that A...

Our guest this week is Natalie Martin, a voracious romance reader from Illinois who we met through Tabby Pawlitzki, host of Modern Life podcast. Natalie is the owner of Just Ask Nat! and a virtual assistant for authors and small businesses including the romance podcast Heaving Bosoms where she has also served as guest co-host. We wanted to dig deep with a fellow book lover who reads romance almost...

This week we are joined by Shelley Sackier who has had an interesting literary journey. She is a young adult fiction writer who has recently published a book about scotch whisky called Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman’s Lifelong Discovery of Whisky. It is part Scotch history, a love letter to the country itself, and part memoir about how her love for the spirit devel...

In this week’s episode, we chat with Erin Flanagan, an author whose debut novel Deer Season won a 2022 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; her most recent book that published this past summer is a thriller called Blackout. Blackout revolves around a sociology professor named Maris who begins having blackouts despite the fact that she gave up drinking seven months before and then discovers other wome...

This week we speak with Cassie Moses, a mom from a small town in Central Kentucky. Cassie grew up in Eastern Kentucky at the Hindman Settlement School where her father was the administrator and where she met and befriended lots of Kentucky artists through the Appalachian Writers Workshop. Cassie began a book club several years ago with her three daughters, and it has offered a way for her to read...

This week is a hybrid episode as we slowly creep back into a recording schedule after a nice long summer break. We’ve got Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky on our minds because of the recent catastrophic flooding in parts of the state so we decided that we’d rebroadcast part of an earlier episode with Kendra Winchester, founder of Read Appalachia on Instagram, who champions Appalachian writers on he...

We are taking the month of July off to recharge but will be back with all new episodes in August. But until then, we have some great replay episodes. This week, we revisit our episode with Melissa Hart, author of Better With Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens. This book is a wonderful resource that offers book suggestions in various categor...

This week Carrie and I traveled to record at the Tompkins-Buchanan-Rankin Mansion, which is a Victorian era mansion built in 1871, with 12-foot ceilings, hand-carved wood balusters, and intricately designed colorful wallpapers. It has been preserved and enveloped by the campus of Spalding University and is the location of their School of Creative and Professional Writing and home base for today’s...

This week’s guest, Angela Jackson-Brown, is an award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright. She is also a professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana who completed her MFA at Spalding University in Louisville where she is also a member of the creative writing graduate faculty. Her most recent novel, When Stars Rain Down, was published in 2021 and is a historical fiction story set in 193...

In this last episode of Season 6, we feature a writer who we had the pleasure of meeting in real life at Carmichael’s Bookstore during a leg of her book tour. Courtney Maum is a celebrated author of literary fiction but her latest book is a memoir about how a return to horse riding in her late 30s helped her rediscover herself. It isn’t uncommon at all for women to lose themselves in their roles a...

We love independent bookstores and try to feature one each season, but this can be difficult. As small business owners, it is often difficult to carve time out of their weeks to speak with us. So we are always grateful when the stars align and we can make it happen.    This week’s episode features Michelle Haring, owner of Cupboard Maker Books in Enola, PA. She tells us about how she first sold ra...

This is the time of year when lots and lots of people travel so it makes sense to have a travel memoirist on our show. Kate Wickers is a British writer who has spent 25 years or so writing about her extensive travel experiences and publishing in magazines and newspapers all over the world. When COVID hit, she decided to turn her many travels with her husband and three sons into a collection of ess...

Once again we have our favorite local bookseller, Sam Miller, of Carmichaels Books in Louisville KY on the show to talk about summer reads. She is like our in house book seller who joins us every summer and winter to tell us what is new and notable in bookstores.   Not all of these books are the typical fluffy summer books about the beach and booze; we have her cover all genres—sci/fi, cookbooks,...

In this episode, we chat with debut novelist Donna Gordon. While she has a long background as a poet and short story writer, she ventured into writing a novel when two ideas began swirling around in her head.    Her novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, tells the story of two characters, Lee and Tomás,  who seem to have nothing that connects them and yet they do. It’s a novel that deals wit...

Readers have heard of the big 5 publishing companies that include Harper Collins, and Penguin/Random House. But there is something really special about university presses. Unfortunately, they don’t often get the attention they deserve. Sarah Munroe, Marketing Manager and Acquisitions Editor at West Virginia University Press, is our guest this week who talks to us about what makes a university pres...

It's travel season and a great time to revisit our episode with travel writers and illustrators Amber Share and Suzanne Roberts. This week’s episode is jam-packed with travel writing. . Our first guest is not a writer, but a graphic designer who began making cool illustrated posters of national parks on an Instagram account called Subpar Parks. Amber Share couples her illustrations with terrible o...

Namrata Patel has been writing for 20 years, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that she had more time to work on it. She had always been interested in dual culture and challenges of the diaspora, specifically Indians who had moved to the United States. The isolation of COVID really brought home how lonely life can be if you don’t feel like you fit anywhere. Her debut novel The Candid Life of Meena...