Vulgar Geniuses

In an age of heavy attempts at erasure, visual artists and photographers Michael Davis and Douglas Shindler are making leaps and bounds to preserve for the future remembrance of all things Black. They are the masterminds behind The Black Library, a collaborative community-driven project with a mission to celebrate Black culture and history for the citizens of Sullivan County, New York, and all tho...

Natalia Sylvester's young adult novel BREATHE AND COUNT BACK FROM TEN will have everyone reimagining a life where all we did was swim our hearts away in the cool spring Florida waters. This beautiful story opens us to the world of Verónica, a Peruvian-American teen who loves the water so much that she longs to become a mermaid at an aquatic theme park. She has two things standing in her way, h...

Debut novel, The Survivalists, from Kashana Cauley starts out as a rom-com that suddenly turns into a love story made for Dateline. We look to see what happens when a young New York lawyer meets a coffee lover who has an over-zealous obsession with preparing for disasters and mastering the right cup of joe. Kashana joins us on the podcast to discuss her novel's inspiration, her own experience...

Delivered in a magnificent thread of verse, We Are All So Good At Smiling by Amber McBride offers a message of hope found in a forest full of secrets and monsters. Whimsy is a teenage girl receiving treatment in a mental hospital when she meets a boy named Faerry. Both of them realize they are magical beings battling secrets from a shared past they are unable to fully remember. Amber Mcbride talks...

Pink and blue, step to the side. There is a new color in town! What Does Brown Mean to You? is the debut children's picture book from educator Ron Grady. In this book, we meet Benny, a little boy talking about different ways the color brown is explored and celebrated throughout his life. From Benny's beautiful brown skin to the color of his grandmother's coffee, the color brown shines throughout t...

Jonathan Escoffery's stellar debut If I Survive You takes the short story genre and turns it on its axis to show the multidimensional underbelly of racism, generational discord, and the toll that a series of bad luck takes on the family dynamic. Escoffery presents a family that has migrated to South Florida to forgo political unrest in Jamaica to make a life in the "land of possibility." The story...

This week on the Vulgar Geniuses Podcast, we get to sit down with Cree Myles, the culture creator and influencer who has built a life sharing her love of Black literature. As the official curator of Penguin Random House's Instagram account, ALL WAYS BLACK, Cree uses creative and innovative ways to celebrate and highlight Black writers. We talk to Cree about her bookstagram origin story, the one th...

Yuyi Morales has captivated children for over 20 years with her vibrant illustrations and beautiful stories. Her most recent release, Bright Star, is a moving story about a young fawn living with her mother in a desert borderland. As the fawn is confronted with obstacles, its mother reassures her to continue in spite of the hardships that arise.  We spoke to Yuyi about her art exhibit Soñador...

The bumper may be dragging, and the engine may be on fire, but we made it to the end of a rollercoaster ride of a year. Most importantly, we ended the year with you! Grab a glass of champagne, sit back, and toast the end of 2022 as we look to see if the resolutions we made in 2021 actually happened and which guest made our top 10 favorite podcasts of the year!  

Morgan Talty's debut, Night of the Living Rez, is a short story collection set in Maine within the community of the Panawahpskek (Penobscot) Nation. The stories focus on David as a young boy adjusting to living on the reservation to him as an adult figuring out life in a community reeling with the aftermath of drug addiction. Talty flawlessly uses time and death to tell a story about family, relat...

JP Perez & Jeremy Ocampo bring excitement and magic to children and adults that visit the wonderful world of Walt Disney every day with their beautiful artwork. They helped to design the newest nighttime show, Enchantment, to commemorate Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom's 50th anniversary. In the stage show Finding Nemo: The Big Blue and Beyond, spectators can also view Ocampo's magnificent i...

Journalist, and author, Albert Samaha talks to us about his book Concepcion: Conquest, Colonialism, and an Immigrant Family's Fate. Samaha takes his family's immigration stories and intertwines them with the fraught history of colonization in the Phillippines. His conversations with family members reveal the oppressive and violent chokehold on a nation that began with Spain and continued to flouri...

In 1995 OutKast won the Source Award for Best New Group. This win prompted boos from the crowd, but it also signaled to the world that Big Boi and André3000 had just ushered in a wave of music that would change the musical landscape for years to come. Dr. Regina N. Bradley's Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South details how music, literature, and film takes a critical eye to the pos...

Marriage of a Thousand Lies author SJ Sindu returns to the Vulgar Geniuses Podcast with their sophomore novel, Blue-Skinned Gods . In India, people make pilgrimages to an ashram to visit Kalki, a Tamil child born with blue skin believed to be the incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. His parents make money from the blessings and miracles Kalki grants to the believers, but he soon doubts his divinit...

We are celebrating a monumental milestone with a special episode of the Vulgar Geniuses Podcast. For our 100th show, we sit down with New York Times bestselling novelist Celeste Ng as we talk about her recent book, Our Missing Hearts .  Bird Gardner is a 12-year-old boy who lives alone with his father after having their lives suddenly interrupted years prior when his mother, Margaret, a Chine...

LARK & KASIM START A REVOLUTION is the recent release from bestselling author Kacen Callender. Lark is a Black, queer, nonbinary, and neurodivergent teen who hopes to snag thousands of Twitter followers and a book deal for an unfinished novel. Kasim accidentally uses Lark's phone to send tweets from their account confessing unrequited love. When they go viral, Lark takes credit for the tweets...

Belinda Huijuan Tang's A Map for the Missing is a story that centers around the possibilities of what could have been as it converges with the limitations of a family and country in turmoil during the Cultural Revolution in China. Family secrets, unrequited love, and a father's sudden disappearance are ingredients that make this debut novel an unforgettable tale. We speak with Belinda about what i...

My Monticello is an ingenious and vividly written novella from debut author Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. She brings all our fears and anxieties to the reading table and asks that we hold them and look at them from all angles. Such as in her story "Buying A House Ahead of the Apocalypse," where a mother makes a list of things she will need when she considers what will be lost during the end of the world...

Elisa A. Bonnin masterfully builds worlds where fantasy and Filipino culture coexist in her debut novel Dauntless.  We follow Seri as she vows to help protect her people from the Beasts that hide in the trees that Seri calls home.  Seri soon discovers that her people are not the only ones to exist in the world, as she meets Tsana. They team up to help keep their nations from entering int...

Tomas Q. Morin's LET ME COUNT THE WAYS is a memoir that will sit with readers long after they close the book. Morin dives deep down into his childhood to bring to the surface key moments of retrospection into the life he lived as he watched his family wrestle with his father's drug addiction and the beginnings of Morin's obsessive-compulsive disorder. We talk with Morin about stepping into a space...

There is no denying that Julie Tieu loves writing about love, and it definitely shows in her sophomore novel CIRCLING BACK TO YOU. Julie joins us on the podcast to talk about how she found her way in the world of all things rom-com. Julie introduces us to Candice and Matt, the ultimate "will they/won't they" couple working in the real estate business. Their friendship blooms into an office romance...

Carlos Allende's newest novel, Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love, is a  comedic thriller from Red Hen Press full of scams and shenanigans. Jignesh is an overweight gay Indian man involved in embezzling money from his job. Everything seems to be going as planned until he accidentally murders a coworker. He hides the body in a deep freezer purchased from Charlie, a man he met on a dating site. But...

We jump off National Hispanic Heritage Month with debut author Sonora Reyes. They join us to chat about their bestselling young adult novel, The Lesbiana's Guide To Catholic School, which has recently found its way on the 2022 National Book Award Longlist for Young Readers. Sonora Reyes' novel brings readers into the life of 17-year-old Yamilet Flores. After being outed by her crush and ex-best fr...

Elaine Hsieh Chou joins us to talk about her debut novel DISORIENTATION an interwoven satire that grapples with the ever-present danger Asian Americans face when racism rears its ugly head in the world of academia. Ph. D. hopeful Ingrid Yang is beginning to unravel as she struggles with writing her dissertation on the late Chinese poet Xiao-Wen Chou. A clue from the library's archive helps her to...

If you have a shared love for murder mystery podcasts and word games, then this episode is just the one you've been waiting for. We travel across the world for our conversation with author Hanna Alkaf to discuss her novel QUEEN OF TILES. Hanna drops us into the city of Kuala Lumpur a year after the mysterious death of Najwa's best friend and Scrabble Champ, Trina Lowe. Najwa is ready to resume her...