This Mama Is Lit!

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Sam Field chat with Kerry Docherty, author of Selfish , about finding quiet moments of creativity, ambition, and why putting yourself first isn’t always selfish. What does it mean to be good? What are the consequences of doing what we want? Who determines what is selfish? These are the questions that haunted Kerry Docherty—the cofounder of Faherty brand, mother of two, and...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Sona Movsesian, author of The World’s Worst Mom , about parenting twins, normalizing vulnerability and finding her voice as a comedy writer. Have you ever wondered if you’re completely failing at parenting? In The World’s Worst Mom , Sona Movsesian delivers a funny, candid, and refreshingly honest look at the gap between the idealized version of par...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Andrea Louie, author of Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon’s Legacy and the Myth of the Model Minority , about her grandmother’s 1952 U.S. Mother of the Year Award. Her most recent book is Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon’s Legacy and the Myth of the Model Minority . In 1952, Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant widow who raised eight chi...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Sam Field chat with Lisa Roe, author of Big & Lily , about sisterhood, second acts, and the ways women learn to rewrite the stories they’ve been living. A sharply funny, deeply heartfelt novel about two sisters who discover the best way to find yourself is by getting lost. For her entire life, Bridget “Big” Ackerman Petty has struggled to hold everything together—her kids,...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Martheaus Perkins, author of The Grace of Black Mothers , about Black motherhood, poetic form, and the complicated inheritance of the American Dream. Martheaus Perkins is a first-generation college graduate and son of a single Black mother. He is the author of The Grace of Black Mothers , published with Trio House Press. His writing has appeared in...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Heather Sweeney, author of Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage, about identity, divorce, and rebuilding after years as a military spouse. Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage is about Heather Sweeney’s journey from being overshadowed by her husband’s military career to rediscovering her iden...

Amanda Fields and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Whitney French, author of Syncopation: A Novel in Verse , about memory, identity, and what it means to reshape yourself in a fractured world. In Syncopation: A Novel in Verse , in the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into new cultures, castes, and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories...

Amanda and Sam chat with Lara Ehrlich, author of Bind Me Tighter Still , about domesticity and wildness in motherhood, the fierce love for our children, and feeling like we’re always falling short. In Bind Me Tighter Still , the youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto, is weary of an existence driven by hunger. She trades her tail for legs, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter—only...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Chloe Yelena Miller, author of Perforated , about impossible wishes and material fears in parenting and poetry. In her second full-length poetry collection, Perforated , Miller’s poems span the grief of public and private losses. The poems are situated in both the US and Italy, ruminating on topics such as immigration, climate change, school shootings, and...

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Rebecca Lehmann, author of The Beheading Game , about rewriting Anne Boleyn through the lens of motherhood, the punishment of powerful women, crafting a queer love story, and bringing poetry to the novel-writing process. Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fe...

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Chloé Caldwell, author of Trying , about loneliness in infertility, contradictions with IVF in the queer community, and the rawness of writing in the moment. Over the years that Chloé had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, m...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Karen Palmer, author of She’s Under Here , about living with an undercurrent of fear and clawing her way out of abuse. In her memoir, Palmer examines why she ended up trapped, how she escaped, and how she handled the ongoing perils of life constructed around a false identity. She ruthlessly explores the lines between desire and fear, victim and perpetrator,...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Dr. Robyn Kozlowitz, author of Post Traumatic Parenting, about using guilt as a teacher, discovering how stress and trauma affect parenting, and creating patterns of joy. Dr. Kozlowitz argues that the best time to rewire our trauma brain is when we are parenting. It gives us an opportunity to heal our inner child through admitting our own damage and...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Michelle Lerner, author of Ring , about defining and treating complicated grief, living with irreparable damage, and finding healing in nature. Ring takes the reader on an unforgettable odyssey through the depths of human emotion, from the hollows of grief to the heights of newfound hope. In the backdrop of a snow-covered sanctuary designed to aid th...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Claire Adam, author of Love Forms , about forced delivery in Venezuela and testing the mother-child bond in fiction. Love Forms, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize , centers on Dawn, a 58 year old mother of two grown sons. She finds herself returning to her past and a secret she has kept for many years. When Dawn was 16, her parents sent her from...

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Living Expenses, about technology creep in modern relationships, fertility treatments’ effect on emotional intimacy, and bookstore karaoke. Teri’s most recent novel interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships and also the discovery that so often it is when we are on the way to something...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Brittany Micka-Foos, author of It’s No Fun Anymore , about domestic horror tropes and how a neurodiversity diagnosis offered insight into writing and motherhood. The lack of safety felt in womanhood and discomfort that lies within it is the discussion that Brittany strives to acknowledge and pursue. Her most recent book is a collection of eight short storie...

Amanda and Eva chat with Domenica Ruta, author of All the Mothers, about a new dialectic in motherhood, the specific anxieties of single moms, and the necessity of single mom communities. She also explores the trials of the family court system and the realities of what those minefields can mean for single moms. Domenica’s latest book, All the Mothers , is a novel that follows three single mothers...

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Jessie Harrold, author of Mothershift , about matrescence - the process of becoming a mother, the four radical transformations, and the seven mother powers. Jessie explains how mothers can be agents of change, and how modern mothers in crisis can step into their innate powers to reclaim themselves. Mothershift is the first book of its kind to dive deeply in...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Liz Alterman, author of Sad Sacked , about the perils and freedoms of unemployment, the dichotomy of working moms, and the need to write the book you want to read. Diving deep into her own family’s dual layoffs, Liz’s memoir uses humor as a healing force as she details the downsizing and uploading of life’s losses and wins. Liz Alterman is the author...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Jessica Slice, author of Unfit Parent , about designing and inventing systems of parenting based on the bodies and minds we live in. Unfit Parent examines the obstacles that disabled parents face, the societal beliefs that undergird those barriers, and the political and economic systems that hold it all in place. Jessica explores how disability culture and...

Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Natasha Williams, author of The Parts of Him I Kept , about parenting her father through schizophrenia and healing through memoir writing. The Parts of Him I Kept is an intimate account of a daughter’s coming of age in the face of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schi...

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Abigail Leonard, author of Four Mothers , about parenting in four different countries, politicizing motherhood, and supporting mothers with the power of community. Utterly moving and propulsively readable from page one, Abigail interweaves stories of four mothers from four different countries with a critically researched exploration of how parental...

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Allison Buccola, author of The Ascent , about the anxieties of new motherhood, renegotiating relationships post-childbirth, and navigating career transitions. Allison’s most recent novel explores an unsolved mystery of a reclusive commune twenty years prior. The only known survivor, Lee, has tried to put the pain of her past behind her, building a new ident...

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Monique Clesca, author of Silence and Resistance: Memoir of a Girlhood in Haiti , about reckoning with family secrets, healing, and fighting for Haitian children’s rights. Monique Clesca is an activist, journalist, and advocate for children’s and women’s rights, participating in high-level policy issues in Haiti and Africa and offering holistic support to g...