F*ing Shakespeare**

Apr 02 2024

F***ing Shakespeare Podcast artwork

The high-art low-brow minds behind Bloomsday Literary bring you interviews with the creatives you should know, but don’t. Poets, novelists, memoirists, & short story writers join co-hosts Kate and Jessica as they take a respectful approach to investigating the writer’s art and an irreverent approach to getting the nitty-gritty on the hustle for publication and exposure. Most of us writers making a living by the pen occupy somewhere between the ubiquitous bestsellers and the people who want to write but bemoan the lack of time to do it. So let Terry Gross interview the top 1%. We’ll set to work making community with everyone else.

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ire'ne lara silva—Texas Poet Laureate

Apr 02 2024 17 mins

Phuc and Kate speak with the acclaimed and straight-up luminous Texas Poet Laureate, ire’ne lara silva, at the 2023 Writer’s Family Reunion sponsored by Writespace.We had the opportunity to chat about her process, the bold and unapologetic treatment of grief in her writing, and how she finds cracks of light in the depths. silva, who is an inductee in the Texas Institute of Lett

AWP23—Enzo Silon Surin

Mar 01 2024 21 mins

Enzo Silon Surin writes, composes, and publishes artifacts on the “witness continuum”—art that he says “pays homage to the culture in which it was formed” and the necessity of generational change. Surin’s work spans librettos commissioned by the Boston Opera Collaborative, four poetry collections, and a musical-in-the-making. He also founded Central Square Press, an ind

AWP23—Alyson Sinclair

Feb 27 2024 31 mins

Does Alyson Sinclair sleep? We had to keep asking ourselves as we chatted it up with Alyson from the floor of AWP (Association of Writing and Writing Program)’s Conference and Bookfair. She’s done it all when it comes to the writing world—bouncing between the bureaucracy of big-four publishers—um, she sent faxes to Seamus Heaney?—to the hustle and bustle world (emphasis o

AWP23—Chelsea Kern from CLMP

Feb 13 2024 17 mins

As Program Director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), Chelsea Kern is the glue that holds so much of the indie literary world together, advocating for mission-driven independent publishers and magazines—and, with equal importance, introducing readers to the work this community produces. It is clear from our conversation, she has a passion for seeing big p

AWP23—Deema Shehabi

Jan 16 2024 21 mins

Poetry “carr[ies] the most human of voices” for Deema Shehabi, a Palestinian-American writer whose work has appeared in publications including The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology and Kenyon Review. Shehabi earned her undergraduate degree in History and International Relations from Tufts University and Master’s in Journalism from Boston University, previously se

AWP23—Maha Ahmed

Dec 19 2023 20 mins

Exploring the specificities of a diaspora while also calling upon ancestral experiences is just one of the many threads Maha Ahmed weaves through her poetry. Like many members of diasporic communities, Maha’s experiences as an Egyptian American do not always resemble the grossly generalized “immigrant story.” We had the opportunity to chat with Maha about writing herself out

AWP23—Matt Bell

Dec 05 2023 27 mins

Matt Bell is an author, English professor, and editor. He currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. In this episode live from the conference floor at AWP 2023, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of his indispensable book on the craft of writing, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. We also discuss his dystopian novel,

AWP23—Kristen Millares Young

Nov 21 2023 15 mins

Kristen Millares Young calls her novel Subduction “a study of recurrently going meta,” or “an examination of the longing that we have to be in contact with others who are not like us.” From exploring the notion of consent–not just sexually but also culturally–to the difficulty of the transmission of knowledge and the burden of whiteness, this novel plumbs the depths of

AWP23—V.V. Ganeshananthan

Nov 07 2023 19 mins

V.V. Ganeshananthan is an author, poet, and journalist, whose works have been featured in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota as a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. Ganeshananthan also co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast with Whitney Terrell

AWP21—Amanda Niehaus

Nov 16 2021 27 mins

Amanda Niehaus has a PhD in Physiological Ecology. She is the author of numerous award-winning short stories, essays, and an acclaimed novel, The Breeding Season (Allen & Unwin, 2019). As part of her author profile (bestill our science-loving hearts) she writes: “Does science belong in literary fiction? As a scientist, I never thought so. But fiction connects with readers, en