Totally Booked with Zibby

I had the best conversation with Natalie Jenner who is a debut author of The Jane Austen Society . Her historical fiction depicts eight extremely different people at the end of World War II who are all dealing with trauma and loss in different ways, and bond over an unknown shared love of Jane Austen. It’s based on an account of the actual formation of the first Jane Austen Society during World Wa...

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Esther Safran Foer. She is the author of the beautiful memoir called I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir , which she wrote to explore her family's history, preserve their names, and share the past with her children, grandchildren and their grandchildren. We talked about how optimism and resilience are entwined with survival and...

Adrienne Bankert is the author of Your Hidden Superpower: The Kindness That Makes You Unbeatable at Work and Connects You with Anyone . She is also an Emmy Award-winning journalist and currently serves as a New York-based national correspondent for ABC News. Her book is incredibly compelling, as was our conversation. Adrienne and I talked about embedding kindness into our identity and harnessing i...

Maria Quiban Whitesell greets millions of Los Angeles viewers daily each morning as Fox 11's meteorologist, and wrote an amazing memoir called You Can't Do It Alone: A Widow's Journey Through Loss, Grief and Life After. It is heartfelt and inspiring, and also a supportive roadmap for readers facing their own hardships. Maria and I talked about her love story with her late husband Sean, parenting t...

Donna Hemans is the amazing, Jamaican-born author of award-winning novel River Woman and most recently, Tea by the Sea . Her short has been featured in Caribbean Writer , Witness and other publications and anthologies.   Tea by the Sea is a heartbreaking and inspiring story about a young mother whose baby was taken from her at birth and we talked all about how she pieced this novel together, that...

I loved interviewing Maria Russo. She is the former children's books editor of The New York Times Book Review, and she and co-author Pamela Paul wrote How to Raise a Reader , which is right up my alley. It was just great to talk about someone who is equally passionate about reading and teaching children to cultivate a lifelong love of reading. Maria talks about how the difficult part is ensuring c...

Today I'm re-releasing my conversation with legendary writer, award-winning novelist, and professor Jamaica Kincaid. Jamaica is most recently the author of children’s book  Party , illustrated by Ricardo Cortés. She has written nearly a dozen books, was a staff writer at  The New Yorker  magazine for over twenty years, and teaches in both the English and African and African American Studies Depart...

I'm re-releasing my episode with Dr. Jewell Parker Rhodes, which I was honored to record with her a number of months ago. She is an award-winning and best-selling author of many books including her most recent, Black Brother, Black Brother . She is such a rock star, and you'll hear more about her impressive background in our episode. We talked a lot about her books, which combine historical fictio...

Six weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Casandra Henriquez ("Coach Cass”) for my Instagram Live show. We had a great time talking about her children's book,  Princess Zara's Birthday Tradition . My almost-7-year-old daughter is a huge fan of Princess Zara’s!   I was able to include  Princess Zara's Birthday Tradition  in an article I wrote for  The Washington Post  wher...

To amplify voices of color, I'm re-releasing my episode with Glory Edim which we recorded in person earlier this year. Glory is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and online community that celebrates the uniqueness of black literature and sisterhood. She originally started this platform on social media as a way to discuss black women writers, non-binary write...

I had such a nice conversation with Brad Montague. It felt so easy getting to know him; he's just an all-around awesome guy. Brad's latest book is called Becoming Better Grownups: Rediscovering What Matters and Remembering How to Fly. He also developed the award-winning series Kid President. Brad goes around the country talking to teachers and educators and everybody else helping us all rediscover...

Leslie Gray Streeter is an award-winning columnist and pop culture critic for The Palm Beach Post  where she has worked since 2002. She wrote a beautiful book about being a widow called Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like "Journey" in the Title . Her story is emotional, honest, and focuses on the small and very human things we not...

Victoria James is the author of Wine Girl: The Obstacles, Humiliations, and Triumphs of America's Youngest Sommelier, her coming-of-age story in the wine world. Victoria has worked in restaurants since she was thirteen and was certified as a sommelier when she was twenty-one. She was Food & Wine 's Sommelier of the Year in 2018 and has appeared on both Forbes  and Zagat's "30 Under 30" li...

I had the best time doing an Instagram Live with Wally Lamb who is the author of six New York Times  best-selling novels: I’ll Take You There , We Are Water , Wishin’ and Hopin’ , The Hour I First Believed , I Know This Much is True , and She’s Come Undone . I Know This Much is True and She’s Come Undone were both selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll...

I was absolutely thrilled to interview Jeanine Cummins for my virtual book club. When American Dirt came out, it was an Oprah's book club pick, landed on the best-seller list, was optioned by Clint Eastwood…. and yet caused an enormous controversy, one that caused Jeanine to cancel her book tour and all events due to death threats and more. I wrote an article defending her work and a novelists’s r...

I loved my conversation with Lily King which I did via Instagram Live in conjunction with the Montclair Literary Festival. Lily's latest novel, Writers & Lovers , was so good that it kept me up late two nights in a row, which is very rare for me. Lily is the author of five best-selling, award-winning novels. Writers & Lovers has been the Read with Jenna book pick, a New York Times  best seller, an...

Mary Beth Keane's most recent novel, Ask Again, Yes , is a New York Times best-seller and The Tonight Show Summer Reads Pick. She has authored two other books, was named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35," and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship for fiction writing. Mary Beth and I talked about the moving moving themes in her novel: forgiveness and sacrifice, depression...

I met Kristy Woodson Harvey last summer at Author's Night for the East Hampton Library, but I interviewed her virtually to talk about her latest book, Feels Like Falling. She has a seriously impressive bio (phi beta kappa!!) which includes authoring many books, some of which have also been optioned for film. Feels Like Falling, about a seemingly unlikely friendship, is funny, relevant, and a book...

Nina Renata Aron recently published a beautiful, gritty, and un-put-down-able memoir called Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls . Nina is a features editor at Full Stop , an online literary magazine and her work has appeared in The New Republic,  The Rumpus,  The Millions , and elsewhere. Nina calls her book a literary memoir about codependency - and while it is really an intense look at love a...

I had the privilege of interviewing the legendary author Judith Viorst as part of the Women on the Move three-part series from the Streicker Center at Temple Emanu-El. Judith is basically who I want to be when I grow up. She has been a prolific writer for decades and just doesn't stop and is amazing. She wrote Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day in 1972, which has sold over...

Phyllis Grant is an IACP finalist for Personal Essays/Memoir Writing and a three-time Saveur Food Blog Award finalist for her blog, Dash and Bella . Her latest book is Everything Is Under Control: A Memoir with Recipes . She has cooked in world-renowned restaurants, including Nobu, Michael's, and Bouley. Her essays and recipes have been published in a dozen anthologies and cookbooks, including Bes...

I had a blast interviewing Meena Harris. Meena is the author of Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea which is based on her aunt and mom, Senator Kamala Harris and Maya Harris, who campaigned to change the playground outside their building when they were kids. She's also the founder and CEO of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, which supports women everywhere and the critical work that's being done for wo...

I did an Instagram Live with Susan Choi, which was so much fun. Susan's first novel, The Foreign Student , won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second novel, American Woman , was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest , was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award....

I interviewed Emily Henry, author of Beach Read , which has been on every most-anticipated summer read list there is! Emily writes stories about love and family for both teens and adults. Her novel follows a romance writer who has stopped believing in love after uncovering some secrets that derail what she knew about her family. Emily and I talked about writing as a way of coping with things we fe...

I had the best time interviewing David Baldacci at seven thirty in the morning on the publication day for his latest novel, Walk the Wire . David is a best-selling author. His first novel was Absolute Power in 1996. The feature film adaptation that followed with Clint Eastwood as its director and star was just one of the many film adaptations of his forty novels that he's written for adults. All h...