Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon

What makes an ordinary person become a dissident? Gal Beckerman explores moral courage through figures like Alexei Navalny, Osip Mandelstam and Etty Hillesum. Then Buzzy Jackson revisits the story of Dutch Resistance fighter Hannie Schaft.

What if patriotism isn’t about claiming America is perfect, but helping it become better? This Independence Day on Writer’s Voice: John de Graaf on the true story behind America the Beautiful Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie on Abigail Adams in A Founding Mother

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 … Continue reading U.S. Media&#...

For SEO, I’d make it shorter and keyword-rich: Alex Woodard discusses Ordinary Soil, a sweeping multigenerational novel about a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle, exploring the deep connections between land, food, health, and identity. Then, in an encore interview, environmental journalist Carey Gillam talks about The Monsanto Papers and the landmark lawsuit in which groundskeeper L...

Writer’s Voice talks with journalist Anand Gopal about his remarkable book Days of Love and Rage. It’s a deeply human story of the Syrian revolution, the democratic experiment in Manbij, the forces that undermined it, and what it can teach us about hope today.

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, … Continue reading...

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...

This week on Writer’s Voice: Elizabeth Vartkessian discusses The Undeserving and the human realities behind America’s death penalty system. Plus an excerpt from my 2020 interview with Abdul El-Sayed on “the epidemic of insecurity” shaping American life.

This week on Writer's Voice: Tim Weed explores psychedelics, Mesoamerican mythology, and consciousness in The Gatepost. Farah Naz Rishi talks grief, siblings, humor, and a runaway cockatoo in The Flightless Birds of New Hope.

Caroline Bicks joins Writer’s Voice to talk about Monsters in the Archives, her fascinating exploration of Stephen King’s private papers, creative process, and the deep emotional fears beneath his horror fiction. Then Marie Adelmann discusses Adjunct, her darkly funny and painfully real novel about precarious academic labor, student debt, and the exploitation built into today’s university system....

This week’s Writer’s Voice: Julia Cooke discusses Starry and Restless, her portrait of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn, women whose adventurous lives helped transform modern journalism. And Sophie Pavelle talks about To Have or To Hold, a deeply engaging exploration of symbiosis and the astonishing partnerships that make life possible.

For Earth Day on Writer’s Voice, Bill McKibben on why solar may be arriving faster than we realize. Then, Anne Fadiman on frogs, pronouns, and the hidden meanings inside ordinary things.

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 2026, marking 50 years of tracking underreported stories. Then, Michael Ellsberg discusses Truth and Consequence, a powerful collection of writings by … Continue reading...

What does climate survival look like—and what’s stopping us from getting there? This week on Writer’s Voice: Ellen Meeropol imagines communities rebuilding in a warming world. Then, Judith Enck reveals how the plastic crisis was engineered—and how we can fight back From empathy to action, this episode connects the dots between storytelling and systemic change.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Schultz joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his new collection Enormous Morning—a moving exploration of aging, memory, regret, and the possibility of beginning again. We also talk about poetry as a way of confronting suffering—and even finding joy.

This week on Writer’s Voice: Julia Cooke on the women who helped invent modern journalism—and why history forgot them. And Ida Turpeinen on extinction, memory, and the stories we fail to tell.

What happens when AI takes over medicine—and what can we do to strengthen our own minds? In this episode of _Writer’s Voice,_ Justin C. Key explores the human cost of AI-driven healthcare, while memory champion Nelson Dellis shares techniques to boost memory, focus, and creativity.

This week on Writer’s Voice: Two fascinating stories from women’s history. Eden Collinsworth tells the story of Victoria Woodhull—the first woman to run for President of the United States. Then novelist Shelley Noble takes us to New York’s legendary Book Row during a fierce battle over censorship.

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.

Political philosopher Lea Ypi reflects on dignity, archives, and the manipulation of history in Indignity. Then Eleanor Shearer brings us into the world of the Jamaican Maroons exiled to Nova Scotia in Fireflies in Winter — a novel about freedom, queer love, and the moral cost of survival.