Writer's Voice

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. What does courage demand when freedom is threatened? This week on Writer’s Voice, two conversations ask one of the hardest questions any of us can face. What does it really mean to resist? First, journalist Gal Beckerman joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his book How to Be a Dissident . Drawing on figures fr...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Patriotism demands more than pride, it demands moral courage. This Independence Day episode of Writer’s Voice explores two remarkable women who believed loving America meant challenging it to live up to its highest ideals. First, filmmaker, author and activist John de Graaf discusses From Sea to Shining Sea ,...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Who gets to tell the story, and who gets erased? This week on Writer’s Voice, we talk with media scholar Robin Andersen about her book The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza . Andersen’s argument is blunt: the American press didn’t just fail to report accurately on Ga...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. The stories we tell can change how we live. This week on Writer’s Voice , a novel about what happens when we lose our connection to the living systems that sustain us. Songwriter and author Alex Woodard joins us to talk about Ordinary Soil , a multigenerational saga of a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Anand Gopal on Syria’s Lost Democratic Revolution What really happened in Syria? In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we talk with journalist Anand Gopal about his extraordinary book Days of Love and Rage . Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Gopal reconstructs the story of ordinary Syrian...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Episode Summary What if the story we tell about civilization is wrong? What if human history isn’t a steady march from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to ever more advanced societies, but something far messier, more inventive, and more fragile — a long experiment of adaptation, collapse, reinvention, and surviva...

In this episode of Writer's Voice, Francesca speaks with Omar Zahzah, Palestinian-American scholar, activist, journalist, and author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. Zahzah offers the first book-length analysis of how major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, systematically supp...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. This week, Elizabeth Vartkessian joins me to discuss The Deserving: What the Lives of the Condemned Reveal About American Justice . Drawing on two decades as a mitigation specialist working with people facing the death penalty, she argues that America’s justice system reflects deeper failures in how we value...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. This week on Writer’s Voice , two novels explore what happens when people are forced out of the lives they thought they understood. First, Tim Weed joins me to talk about The Gatepost , a speculative thriller that blends archaeology, psychedelics, quantum theory and Mesoamerican mythology into a story about g...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. This week, we begin with a look at how Stephen King’s work strikes at the heart of our most basic fears. Caroline Bicks takes us inside Stephen King’s private archives to explore how horror works, and why King’s stories continue to haunt us. Her book is Monsters In The Archives . “He doesn’t just...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. This week’s Writer’s Voice features two new books that take us into very different realms of hidden history. First, Julia Cooke joins Francesca to talk about Starry and Restless , her vivid group portrait of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn, three adventurous women writers who expanded what journ...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. What if the energy transition is arriving faster than anyone imagined? And what if paying attention to the smallest things can change how we live? This Earth Day, Writer’s Voice revisits our interview with Bill McKibben about Here Comes the Sun , a bracing and hopeful argument that cheap, abundant solar...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. In this episode of Writer’s Voice , Francesca Rheannon speaks with Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored about the State of the Free Press 202 6, marking 50 years of tracking underreported stories. “Censorship by proxy… corporate entities… are in effect doing the dirty work of the government.”  Then, Michael...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. In this episode of Writer’s Voice , two powerful voices explore the climate crisis from complementary perspectives. Novelist Ellen Meeropol imagines communities navigating climate disruption in Sometimes an Island . “The challenge is enormous. How do you dramatize doom?… You have to find a balance between the...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz joins Writer’s Voice to discuss his new collection, Enormous Morning . Writing from the vantage point of his 80th year, Schultz reflects on aging, memory, family, regret—and the possibility of transcendence. “Age has… given me a kind of love of my life and the lives...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Julia Cooke discusses Starry and Restless , her group biography of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily “Mickey” Hahn—women journalists whose restless lives and innovative writing helped shape modern literary journalism, even as their contributions were later minimized....

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. On this episode of  Writer’s Voice , we talk with novelist Justin C. Key about  The Hospital at the End of the World ,  a gripping speculative story that explores the ethical and human stakes of AI in medicine. “Technology is best when it’s a tool wielded by humans.” Then, memory champion Nelso...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. This week on Writer’s Voice , two authors explore fascinating episodes from women’s history—stories of bold individuals who challenged the boundaries of power, speech, and social convention. Journalist Eden Collinsworth discusses The Improbable Mrs. Woodhull , her biography of Victoria Woodhull—an astonishing...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. In this episode of Writer’s Voice , Francesca Rheannon speaks with bestselling author Jung Chang about her memoir Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself, and China , the long-awaited sequel to her landmark book Wild Swans . Chang recounts how her parents — once devoted Communists — became disillusioned by famine,...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. In this episode of Writer’s Voice , Francesca Rheannon speaks with political philosopher Lea Ypi about Indignity: A Life Reimagined , a genre-blending work of memoir, history, and philosophical inquiry that explores dignity under authoritarian regimes. “I think of [dignity] as a property that is really what m...