Thresholds (Jordan Kisner)

Kate Zambreno is the author of several acclaimed books including Screen Tests, Heroines, and Green Girl. Her latest novel, Drifts, was released in May 2020. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, VQR, and elsewhere. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

This episode is brought to you by: Betterhelp. Get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/thresholds; What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron, now available wherever you get books from Catapult; and, Luster by Raven Leilani, now available from FSG.

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Sanaë Lemoine tells Jordan about the moment she learned her father had a second family and the ways that that reveal changed her life, her family, her relationship to secrets -- and helped inspire The Margot Affair.

Sanaë Lemoine was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA at Columbia University. She now lives in New York.

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Wendy S. Walters' current projects address class and racial disquietude in the industrial Midwest; intersections between writing and design, and organic forms in the essay. She is the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, Huffington Post, and others. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Walters is a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee in literary nonfiction. In 2018-19 she was artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, where she worked on developing the book for their opera, Golden Motors. Her work has been published in The Normal School, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Full Bleed, Flavorwire, and Harper’s among many others. 

Hosted by Jordan Kisner. Produced by Justin Alvarez and Drew Broussard. Music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud. Art by Kirstin Huber. Presented by Lit Hub Radio.

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Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction books Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (July 2021), for which she received a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017) as well as the forthcoming graphic novel Terrible Men, all from Pantheon.

She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine. 

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Elle, Vogue, NPR.org, and many other places.

Find her on Twitter @kristenradtke and on Instagram @kristenradtke_.

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Jordan talks to Dr. Carl Erik Fisher (The Urge: Our History of Addiction) about perceiving addiction as a spectrum, the historical evolution of addiction as a concept, and the psychotic break that led to his own sobriety.

Mentioned:

Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England by Rebecca Lemon

The Faust legend

The American temperance movement

Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate by Walt Whitman

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son

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Jordan visits with poet Mary Ruefle at her home in Vermont for a conversation about the passage of time, the both-sides-ness of thresholds, memory -- and the best way to cook an egg.

Mary Ruefle is the author Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize and the 2019 LA Times Book Prize and was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award and the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. She's also written many other books including My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.

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Patrick Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney's). His work has appeared in numerous places including Granta, Buzzfeed, Vice, Bomb, The White Review, and has been anthologized in Pets (Tyrant Books). He most recently guest-edited an issue of McSweeney's Quarterly dedicated to queer fiction. He's the winner of a Whiting Award in Fiction and his work is being translated into Korean, French, Italian, and Turkish.

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Sarah Manguso talks to Jordan about thinking she'd never write a novel, processing the place you come from, and the cold silence of whiteness.

Mentioned:

* the four-minute mile

* Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Wallace Stevens

* Antoine Wilson's Mouth to Mouth

* "A Boston Toast" by John Collins Bossidy

Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, most recently the novel Very Cold People. Her nonfiction books are 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, and her poetry collections are Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Born and raised in Massachusetts, she now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at Antioch University.

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Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary, which was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, and New York Magazine's The Cut. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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Heather Radke joins Jordan to talk about Butts: A Backstory, the playful invitation of the book's title, the general unruliness of bodies, and the joys of a JSTOR deep-dive.

MENTIONED:

• Jodie Foster's Coppertone ad
• "Baby Got Back," Sir Mix-a-lot
• Elizabeth Alexander's "The Venus Hottentot"
• The Normman & Norma Statues

Heather Radke is an essayist, journalist, and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab, the Peabody Award­–winning program from WNYC. She has written for publications including The Believer, Longreads, and The Paris Review, and she teaches at Columbia University’s creative writing MFA Program. Before becoming a writer, Heather worked as a curator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago.

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Allegra Hyde talks to Jordan about the peripatetic experience she had trying to find herself in utopian communities after college -- and a transformative near-miss with a mushroom that led her to where she is now.

MENTIONED:

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• the Rainbow Valley Community in New Zealand
• Brook Farm
• Important Saftey Tip: never eat a raw mushroom or one you haven't safely identified as non-poisonous. We recommend this handy NYT guide on "How to Forage Mushrooms" as a place to start for the aspiring forager.

Allegra Hyde is the author of ELEUTHERIA, as well as the short story collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Hyde's writing has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best Women’s Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Threepenny Review, and many other venues. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.

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Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine

In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of three novels, two memoirs, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her novels include So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, Pulling Taffy, and Sketchtasy. Her first memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award. Her recent memoir, The Freezer Door, has been longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her most recent anthology, Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. She recently completed a new anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis, which will be published in October. Her activism has included ACT UP in the early ’90s, Fed Up Queers in the late ’90s, Gay Shame, and other unnamed groups.

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Jordan talks to Maggie Nelson about hope, about hitting one's threshold, and about trying to respond to current events in On Freedom without dating the text.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently On Freedom. She's also the author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.

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Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels PARAKEET (New York Times Editors’ Choice) and 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her fourth book, the novel BEAUTYLAND, is forthcoming from FSG.

Her work has been translated into eight languages, and has received The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize and two special mentions, fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference, where she was the Walter E. Dakin fellow. Her work has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. A former editor for One Story and Catapult, she teaches fiction in the MFA programs of NYU and The New School. In Spring 2020 she was the Distinguished Kittredge Visiting Writer in University of Montana’s MFA.

She has worked as a biographer for people living with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

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Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His latest book, A Little Devil in America, was released in March 2021 to critical acclaim. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

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adrienne maree brown joins Jordan to talk about the moment she learned what her style of leadership looked like, about the power of saying things aloud, and about her love of Octavia Butler and finding her way to writing fiction.

MENTIONED:

The League of Young Voters (or The League of Pissed-Off Voters)

AK Press

Left Turn Magazine's 2010 issue "Other Worlds are Possible: Visionary Fiction, Culture, and Organizing" edited by Walidah Imarisha

Octavia E. Butler's archive at the Huntington Library in Pasadena

adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.

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Jordan talks with Jeff VanderMeer about the process of re-wilding his backyard, his initial obsession with uprooting air potatoes, learning to see more of the natural world, and where his fiction is headed next.

MENTIONED:

Air potatoes

The Atlanta Botanical Garden

Florida House Representative Anna Eskamani

"How to Rewild Your Balcony" from Esquire

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, Dead Astronauts, Borne, The Ambergris Trilogy, and The Southern Reach Trilogy, the first volume of which, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman. VanderMeer speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cats, plants, and bird feeders.

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Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of five poetry collections, including Seeing the Body (W. W. Norton, 2020) and Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011), which was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus American Library Association. She is also a visual artist and photographer, and the creator of Poets on Poetry (P.O.P). Her honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, The Millay Residency, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Soul Mountain, and Vermont Studio Center. Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New York City.

This episode is brought to you by: Betterhelp. Get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/thresholds; What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron, now available wherever you get books from Catapult; and, Luster by Raven Leilani, now available from FSG.

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Jordan talks to memoirist and fiction writer Saïd Sayrafiezadeh about growing up in the Socialist Workers Party, deprogramming from childhood, and how even in fiction, the memoirist doesn't fall far from the memoir.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author, most recently, of the story collection American Estrangement. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was called one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times and his story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship. Saïd lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Karen Mainenti, and serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and he leads the Creative Nonfiction track in Hunter's MFA program. He also teaches creative writing at Columbia University and New York University, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.

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This episode is presented in collaboration with the 2021 Miami Book Fair. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is just one of the many writers from around the world participating in the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. This year's Miami Book Fair takes place online and in person from November 14th to November 21st. Please visit miamibookfair.com for more information, or follow MBF at @miamibookfair

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Jordan talks Susan Orlean (author of On Animals and The Library Book and The Orchid Thief and those hilarious tweets) about finding the right way to tell a story, taking risks in hopes an audience will come along, and starting out as a beat reporter writing about the drudgery of city government.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of eight bestselling books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and Twitter.com/SusanOrlean

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Eight new conversations, one new season. Thresholds is a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the new essay collection, Thin Places, and presented by Lit Hub Radio. Season 2 will begin publishing next Wednesday, August 12th. Learn more at www.thisisthresholds.com.

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Comedian Hari Kondabolu joins Mira to talk about seeing space for himself on the screen, discovering an answer to the question of how to be in the world, the first joke he was really proud of, and the power that comes from alienating an audience on purpose. There's a lot of laughter in this one, y'all -- as you might expect.

MENTIONED:

• People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive in 1992: Nick Nolte
• Apu
• Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal
• Hari's 'diamond' joke
• Race by Paul Mooney
• Stewart Lee

Also, a big announcement: Hari has a new comedy special coming to YouTube on April 18th -- "Vacation Baby"! Get excited; we sure are!!

Hari Kondabolu is a comedian, writer and podcaster based in Brooklyn, NY. He currently co-hosts the Netflix food competition show “Snack vs. Chef” with Megan Stalter. His 2018 Netflix special “Warn Your Relatives” was named one of the best of the year by Time, Paste Magazine, Cosmopolitan, E! Online, and Mashable. In 2017, his truTV documentary “The Problem with Apu” was released and created a global conversation about race and representation, and is now used in high school, college and grad school curriculums around the country. Hari has also released two comedy albums, “Waiting for 2042” & “Mainstream American Comic.” Additionally, he has performed on Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Show with David Letterman and among many others. He is also a former writer & correspondent on the much loved, Chris Rock produced FX show “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.” He’s a regular panelist on “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” and a regular guest-host on “Midday” on WNYC. As a podcaster, he co-hosted the popular “Politically Reactive” with W. Kamau Bell. Additionally, he also co-hosts what he politely describes as a “pop up podcast,” The Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Podcast with his younger brother Ashok (“Dap” from HBO’s Chillin’ Island and rap group Das Racist.) Hari attended both Bowdoin College and Wesleyan University and earned a Masters in Human Rights from the London School of Economics in 2008.

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Poet Saeed Jones joins Jordan to talk about the long-term experience of grief, the intensity of writing from the point of view of another person, and the unexpected trilogy of his first three books.

MENTIONED:

• Paul Mooney
• Diahann Carroll
• Whitney Houston
• Toni Morrison

Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the poetry collection PRELUDE TO BRUISE, winner for the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford American and GQ among other publications. His new poetry collection ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD is out now.

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What a year it has been! 47 episodes featuring some of the most incredible guests ruminating on the most fascinating topics. We dove into the archives to revisit a handful of memorable moments -- featuring Eileen Myles, Ross Gay, C Pam Zhang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Lydia Millet, Hanif Abdurraqib, Jericho Brown, Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein, and Maggie Nelson.

We'll be back in 2022! See you then!

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Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Her most recent collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, was released this year and has been longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.

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Now celebrating its fifth season, Storybound is a radio theater program designed for the podcast age. Hosted by 2021 KCRW Radio Race winner Jude Brewer, Storybound presents the voices of today’s best writers, like Mitchell S. Jackson, Tamara Winfrey-Harris, and Clint Smith, reading accomplished works of fiction and non-fiction. You’ll also hear original music specially composed for the respective text. Needless to say, it’s an immersive storytelling experience.

The episode we’re sharing today features Danté Stewart reading from Shoutin’ In The Fire: An American Epistle — his stirring account of his religious experience and of his grappling with the racism endemic in history. It’s a story of difficult turning points and sometimes painful epiphanies that’s perfect for Thresholds listeners. 

If you enjoy what you hear, make sure to follow Storybound (for free) wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jordan talks with Kiese Laymon about fear, loving an enemy, trying not to write wack-ass shit, and what it was like to buy back the rights to his first books in order to have them revised and republished.

Mentioned:

"How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" at Gawker

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

"Come and Get Me" -- Jay-Z

Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize lecture

Jesmyn Ward

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the author of the genre-bending novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on several new projects, including the long poem Good God, the horror comedy And So On, the children’s book City Summer, Country Summer, and the film Heavy: An American Memoir. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing.

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Hafizah Geter (The Black Period) joins Jordan to discuss her family's influence on her work, the power of memory, being in conversation with the writers you love, and how all of us live in a mix of genres.

MENTIONED:

• Goya's Black Paintings
• "Fighting Erasure" by Parul Sehgal
• Toni Morrison's concept of rememory
• Fela Kuti, Yussef Lateef, Otis Redding

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American, an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb, The Believer, The Paris Review, among many others. The poetry committee co-chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, she is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless nonfiction fellow, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a 92Y Women inPower Fellow and holds an MFA in nonfiction from New York University, where she was an Axinn Fellow. Hafizah lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, was released in August 2020 and won the Kirkus Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Yale Review, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She completed her MFA at NYU.

Thank you to The House of Chanel for sponsoring this episode. Find out more at inside.Chanel.com.

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Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award-winning writer, speaker, cancer survivor, and activist. She served on Barack Obama's President's Cancer Panel, and her advocacy work, reporting, and speaking has been featured at the United Nations, on Capitol Hill, and on the TED Talk main stage. When she's not on the road with her 1972 Volkswagen camper van and her rescue dog Oscar, she lives in Brooklyn.

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Jordan talks to Andrew Martin about a trip to Montana in the midst of a tumultuous year, putting on a persona for writing, and how the two combined to change the way he tells stories.

Andrew Martin's most recent book is a story collection entitled Cool for America. His first novel Early Work was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award. His stories and essays have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He lives in New York with his partner, Laura, and their dog Bonnie.

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Jordan talks to Deesha Philyaw about getting out of a bad marriage, learning to embrace life again, and doing it all while putting together a short story collection.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.

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Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

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Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Her latest work includes the memoir In the Dream House and the comic In the Low Low Woods. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

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Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. Her novel Hurricane Season was a finalist for the 2020 Man Booker International Prize and was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. A collection, This Is Not Miami, is forthcoming from New Directions.

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Celeste Ng joins Jordan to talk about her new book Our Missing Hearts, motherhood and parenting while writing, and the big questions of what kind of place art can have in the fight against fascism.

MENTIONED:

• The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
• #DontLookAway / #NoKidsInCages
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, will be published in October 2022. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.

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In this episode, Jordan talks to Michelle Orange about her new book, Pure Flame, the archetypal relationship between mothers and daughters, and the politics and perils of being a woman.

Michelle Orange is author of Pure Flame (2021) and the essay collection This Is Running for Your Life, which was named a best book of 2013 by The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, The Nation, and many other outlets. A contributing editor and columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, she is a faculty mentor in the graduate writing program at Goucher College and an adjunct assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.

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J Wortham joins Mira to talk about the power of changes -- changing location, changing names, changing pronouns -- and the space that can open up as a result of them. Plus, some love for benevolent conspiracies!

MENTIONED:

• Alejandro's Run in LA
• Still Processing
• Kristy from The Babysitter's Club

J Wortham (they/them) is a sound healer,, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation. J is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and co-host of the podcast ‘Still Processing,’ They occasionally publish thoughts on culture, technology and wellness in a newsletter. J is the proud editor of the visual anthology “Black Futures,” a 2020 Editor's choice by The New York Times Book Review, along with Kimberly Drew, from One World. J is also currently working on a book about the body and dissociation for Penguin Press. J mostly lives and works on stolen Munsee Lenape land, now known as Brooklyn, New York, and is committed to decolonization as a way of life.

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It's the end of our last full capsule for 2022 -- and what a joyful, life-affirming batch of conversations it was! First up, we've got Saeed Jones offering some writing advice (and an exercise, of sorts) -- then some alumni news and a call to pre-order several 2023 releases -- and finally, Chloé Cooper Jones and Jordan get into talking about revision and the life-affirming process of writing.

MENTIONED:

• The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee
• Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
• Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter
• The Last Catastrophe by Allegra Hyde

Stay tuned for some end-of-year surprises and celebrations, coming very shortly!

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Ahmed Naji, a writer from Egypt, is presently a fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. His work touches on a variety of themes, including sci-fi, Islamic methodology, sex, friendship, prison literature, music, magic, and masculinity. Naji’s novel, Using Life, was among the “Tales of a Fantastic Future” shortlisted by the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards (2018). The work also led to a two-year prison sentence in Egypt for obscenity and disturbing public morals. Naji served a year of his sentence and was honored by the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award in 2016.

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Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was named a Best Book of 2017 by Esquire, Book Riot, The Cut, Electric Literature, Bustle, Medium, Refinery29, The Brooklyn Rail, Salon, The Rumpus, and others. Her second essay collection, Girlhood, was published by Bloomsbury on March 30, 2021. A craft book will be published by Catapult in 2022. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, she is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

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It’s the end of our ‘experimentation’ capsule of episodes and Jordan is joined in the studio by Thresholds producer Drew Broussard for a grab-bag of outtakes, audience questions, and more.

MENTIONED:

• Sheila Heti asks Jordan a question she’s never been asked before
• Alexander Chee recommends some books, music, and more to get a person through stressful times
• Jordan tells Drew about a poem by Jericho Brown that knocked her over
• Advice for what to do when the writing gets hard

We'll be back March 23rd!

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Jordan talks with N. Scott Momaday about the Stanford fellowship that changed his life, the importance of taking the natural world into your heart, and the genius of Emily Dickinson.

MENTIONED:

The Stanford Creative Writing Fellowship (now the Stegner Fellowship)

"My Cricket" by Emily Dickinson

The Pueblo of Jemez

N. Scott Momaday is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, artist, teacher, and storyteller whose works celebrate and preserve Native American heritage. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and the 2021 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A longtime professor of English and American literature, Momaday earned his PhD from Stanford University and retired as Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. He lives in New Mexico and his latest book is Dream Drawings.

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Thresholds is back! To open a new season, Jordan sits down with McKenzie Wark live at PioneerWorks in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for a conversation about raving, gender transition, and the radical work of "playing" with form.

MENTIONED:

• Leonora Carrington
• Kenneth Goldsmith
• Audre Lorde’s Zami
• Zoo, Or Letters Not About Love

McKenzie Wark is the author of Love & Money, Sex & Death; Raving; Capital Is Dead; Reverse Cowgirl, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She is a Professor of Culture and Media and Program Director of Gender Studies at the New School.

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Jordan talks with artist and writer Maira Kalman about the death of her husband Tibor Kalman, the process of grief, and her irrepressible creative spirit.

MENTIONED:

• Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
• Sarah Berman's Closet
• The Diaries of Franz Kakfa by Franz Kafka, tr. by Ross Benjamin
• "Cheek to Cheek" by Irving Berlin, sung by Fred Astaire

Maira Kalman was born in Tel Aviv and moved to New York City with her family at the age of four. She has written/illustrated over 30 books for adults and children, been a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker, and created textiles for Isaac Mizrahi and Kate Spade and sets for Mark Morris. Other collaborations have been with Nico Muhly, Alex Kalman, Michael Pollan, David Byrne, John Heginbotham, and Gertrude Stein. Her watch and clock designs appear under the M&Co label, the design studio created by her late husband Tibor Kalman. She has won many awards and given numerous talks, including several TED talks. Her art has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her latest book is Women Holding Things.

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Jordan talks with Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) about money, freedom, his recent period of creative fecundity, and the enduring power of art.

MENTIONED:

• The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
• Family Meal by Bryan Washington
• Zero K by Don DeLillo
• Agnes Martin

Rumaan Alam is the author of three novels: Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. Other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the New Republic. He studied writing at Oberlin College and now lives in New York with his family.

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Jordan chats with Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom) about hiding from herself, the death of her father, and the challenges of writing a book without knowing where it will go.

MENTIONED:

• The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman
• Walking and Talking (1996, written & directed by Nicole Holofcener)
• "The Teens Have Made Nirvana Preppy" by Sarah Stankorb

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and The Long Goodbye, as well as the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and more. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she resides in New Haven, where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review.

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Jordan talks with Vinson Cunningham (Great Expectations) about finding himself in the midst of history, discovering ways to hang onto moments, and why he turned to his real life for his debut novel.

MENTIONED:

• The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
• Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
• "How Auto is Auto-fiction" by Christian Lorentzen
• "American Boy" by Estelle
• The Idiot by Elif Batuman
• Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Fader, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s. A former staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in New York City.

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Jordan chats with Dorothea Lasky (The Shining) about interpreting a horror classic in her latest poetry collection, her love for horror, and why playfulness and horror aren't incompatible—and might in fact be inextricably connected.

MENTIONED:

• The Shining by Stephen King
• The Shining (1980)
• Bernadette Mayer's "Memory" project

Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of The Shining  (October 2023), and Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She is also the author of Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of six chapbooks. Born in St. Louis in 1978, she has poems that have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6x6, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013), co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (with Alex Dimitrov, Flatiron Books, 2019) and is a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

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This is a re-airing of our 2021 episode with the poet and bestselling essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We're celebrating the release of her new collection, BITE BY BITE: NOURISHMENTS AND JAMBOREES. Come for the new intro about pizza on the beach, stay for Aimee's reflections on everything from champion trees to 80s-era Madonna to what society tells us about who "gets to" be comfortable in nature.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS (2020, Milkweed Editions), which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

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Shades on, sleeves up—it's summertime and we're back! This week, Jordan talks with Amy Lin, author of Here After, about grief, the sudden loss of her husband, miracles, and her family's history with thin places.

Amy Lin lives in Calgary, Canada where there are two seasons: winter and road construction. She completed her MFA at Warren Wilson College and holds BAs in English Literature and Education. Her work has been published in places such as Ploughshares and she has been awarded residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala. She writes the Substack At The Bottom Of Everything where she wonders: how do we live with anything? Here After is her first book.

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Jordan chats with Emma Copley Eisenberg (Housemates) about a ghostly encounter that led to her new novel, the opposing worldviews of Grace Paley and Ottessa Moshfegh, and the choice to make art in difficult times.

MENTIONED:

• Jazz by Toni Morrison
• Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth
• Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter
• "Why I Write" by George Orwell

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the nationally bestselling novel Housemates and the narrative nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, VQR, American Short Fiction, and other publications. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.

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Ed Yong joins Jordan to tell the story of his pandemic puppy, Typo, and how introducing a new animal to his household deepened his understanding of the book he was working on. Plus, what it's like to take a break from covering the pandemic to write an entire book.

MENTIONED:

Our Dogs, Ourselves by Alexandra Horowitz

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021

OUR PLANET (Netflix)

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His next book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, is out in June 2022. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and more. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Liz Neeley, and their corgi, Typo.

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Jordan chats with Sofia Samatar (The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain and Opacities) about having two books out this year, doing everything twice (once in non-fiction, once in fiction), and her growing sense of an ongoing overarching project to her work.

MENTIONED:

• A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
• Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar and Del Samatar
• The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar
• Tender: Stories by Sofia Samatar
• Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno
• Quicksand by Nella Larsen
• Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, tr. by Katy Derbyshire

Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria to Opacities, a nonfiction book about writing, publishing, and friendship.

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This week, Jordan talks to the novelist Sigrid Nunez about her youthful preoccupation with mimicking the prose of Virginia Woolf, the step-by-step intuitive way she writes prose now, and the best way to make overnight oats.

Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In 2024, The New York Times listed The Friend among the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The Friend has been adapted for film by directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024). What Are You Going Through has been adapted for a film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door (2024). Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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We're revisiting our 2021 interview with the poet Jericho Brown, who this week was named a MacArthur Fellow-- one of the highest honors in the arts and humanities. He and Jordan talk about the great mystery of why we desire the things we desire; about oration and the poets he read and memorized as part of his own becoming; mitigating our impulses toward violence with tenderness, and more.

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

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This week, we bring you a live interview with Garth Greenwell, conducted in October 2024 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Garth talks about growing up in Kentucky assuming that he would die young, the teacher who gave him a path toward being an artist, and the doggedness with which he has pursued his aesthetic practices (in both music and literature) ever since.

Mentioned:

Garth's new novel, Small Rain (FSG 2024)

Frank Bidart

Benjamin Britten

Così Fan Tutte

The HIV/AIDS crisis

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications.  A new novel, Small Rain, is now out from FSG. He is the recipient of many honors for his work, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, Princeton, and NYU. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. 

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This week, Jordan sits down to talk with Lidia Yuknavitch about menopause, where stories lodge in our bodies, having a creative process that takes the shape of an ocean wave, and more.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of four novels: Thrust, The Book of Joan, Dora: A Headcase, and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Awards Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the OBA Reader's Choice Award. She has also published a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books in 2017. Verge, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2020. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. Her newest memoir, Reading the Waves, was published by Riverhead books in 2025. She is a very good swimmer.

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This week, we're sharing a live conversation between Jordan and Carvell Wallace, recorded last year at P&T Knitwear in New York. They talk about his new memoir, Another Word for Love, a moment of real peril from his childhood, and the long process that followed for him of learning to embrace vulnerability, connection, and his own writing voice.

Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. His debut memoir, Another Word For Love (MCD, 2024), explores his life, identity, and love through stories of family, friendship, and culture and is a 2024 Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction. He was a 2019 Peabody Award nominee, a 2022 National Magazine Award Finalist, a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, and a 2025 UCross Fellow. He lives in Oakland.

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This week, Jordan sits down to talk with Maya Binyam, author of the novel Hangman,about a near-drowning that changed her life.

Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Dublin Literary Award. She is the recipient of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, theNew Yorker,Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She is an advisory editor of theParis Review.

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Jordan sits down to talk with Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches, about writing the non-human world, leaving the world of legacy media, and how they've learned from the deep sea --and from their colleagues-- about the power of collectivity.

Mentioned in the episode:

• how to write a book on top of a full-time job
• uncharismatic microfauna
• Sabrina's essay on salps and queer collectivity, from How Far the Light Reaches
• Who Is Steven Hotdog?

Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a Los Angeles Times book prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (geology), was published by Black Lawrence Press, and was selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program.

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Jordan talks with Ashley C. Ford (author of the memoir Somebody's Daughter) about how writing made her into more of herself, about the systems that we live under, and about finding joy in new community.

MENTIONED:

• Dr. Jill Christman, professor at Ball State
• paying off lunch debts (check out All for Lunch!)
• Onsite Workshops in Tennessee

Ashley C. Ford is a writer, host, and educator who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with her husband, poet and fiction writer Kelly Stacy, and their chocolate lab Astro Renegade Ford-Stacy. Ford is the former host of The Chronicles of Now podcast, co-host of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, seasons one & three of MasterCard’s Fortune Favors The Bold, as well as the video interview series PROFILE by BuzzFeed News, and Brooklyn-based news & culture TV show, 112BK.

She was also the host of the first season of Audible's literary interview series, Authorized. She has been named among Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 in Media (2017), Brooklyn Magazine's Brooklyn 100 (2016), Time Out New York's New Yorkers of The Year (2017), and Variety’s New Power of New York (2019)

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Jordan talks with Jhumpa Lahiri about her new collection of essays (Translating Myself and Others), how Ovid helped her navigate her mother’s death, and how translating her own new story collection is an exciting way to edit.

MENTIONED:

• the Roman god Janus
• the novels of Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)
• Ovid's Metamorphoses
• "je est un autre" -- Arthur Rimbaud

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of Translating Myself and Others as well as four works of fiction including the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and another work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories and has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone into English. She teaches creative writing and literary translation at Princeton University, where she is director of the Program in Creative Writing.

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Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. It is currently in development as a television series with Film 44.

Hosted by Jordan Kisner. Produced by Justin Alvarez and Drew Broussard. Music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud. Art by Kirstin Huber. Presented by Lit Hub Radio.

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Jordan talks to journalist Lauren Sandler about how close you can or should get to your subjects, about who gets to write what and why, and about the driving forces behind the stories that intrigue her.

Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her most recent book is the bestselling This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home (named a Notable Book of 2020 by The New York Times) and she's the author of two previous books -- One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.  

Lauren's essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle. She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk. She has led the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, UVA, and Dartmouth, and has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU, where she has also been Visiting Scholar. Lauren is a member of NationSwell Council. She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a Mid-Atlantic Fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and a Brown Foundation resident at the Maison Dora Maar in Menerbes, France.

This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.

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Jordan talks with Ingrid Rojas Contreras (The Man Who Could Move Clouds) about the accident that left her with amnesia, grappling with the decision to write about her family, and the importance of offering healing.

MENTIONED:

• A black Vera Wang gown
• Curanderos
• Topographical disorientation

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her latest book, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

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To celebrate the paperback release of Thin Places, this special episode features Jordan in the interview seat in a conversation with returning guest Lydia Millet!

Jordan Kisner writes essays, features, and reviews for n+1, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, and others. She also writes a column for The Paris Review. Her first book, Thin Places, was one of NPR’s “best books of 2020.” She is also the host of Thresholds.

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections, often about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her latest novel A Children's Bible was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2020. She also writes essays, opinion pieces and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999.

For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com

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Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. He is a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His New York Times-bestselling novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was published in 2019 and his debut poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds was an NYT Top Ten Book of 2016. He serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.

This episode is brought to you by: Betterhelp. Get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/thresholds; What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron, now available wherever you get books from Catapult; and, Luster by Raven Leilani, now available from FSG.

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Rachel Kushner is the author of the internationally acclaimed novels THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, as well as a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K. Her new book, THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020 was published in April 2021. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages.

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Jordan talks with Crystal Hana Kim (If You Leave Me) about the ultimate unknowability of another person's story, about motherhood as a writer, and about how a friend's validation and encouragement helped her get serious about her craft.

MENTIONED:

• The Korean War
• Post-partum depression
• Reproductive justice
• Ceramics class

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was a Booklist Editor’s Choice title and named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and is a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner. Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. Her second novel, The Stone Home, is forthcoming from William Morrow / HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

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Fariha Róisín is an NYC based, Australian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist with an interest in her wellness, Muslim identity, race, self-care pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, Village Voice and others. She writes a weekly newsletter here and is also the Deputy Editor of Violet Book.

She has published How To Cure A Ghost (Abrams, 2019), Being In Your Body (Abrams, 2019) and Like A Bird (Unnamed Press, 2020) which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR, Globe and Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, a must-read by Buzzfeed News and received a starred review by the Library Journal. Her first work of non-fiction is forthcoming and entitled Who Is Wellness For? On Radical Wellness (HarperWave, Spring 2022).

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Jordan talks with Jessamine Chan about the ways having a kid changed her writing, about the difficulties mothers face in America, and about the one very good day of writing that led to The School for Good Mothers.

MENTIONED:

• "Where is Your Mother?" by Rachel Aviv (The New Yorker)
• Cost of Living by Emily Maloney
• SCOTUS draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
• The Ragdale Foundation

Jessamine Chan's debut novel is The School for Good Mothers, an instant New York Times bestseller. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and Epoch. A former reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, she holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Brown University. Her work has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Jentel, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Anderson Center, VCCA, and Ragdale. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.

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Jordan talks to Amy Fusselman about writers who perform, getting out of your own head, and the agonies and ecstasies of comedy. It's a laugh-out-loud kind of episode.

MENTIONED:

• McSweeney's Internet Concern
• "Hawk" by Joy Williams
• Second Position

Amy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Mean$, is her first novel.

Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Ms., ARTnews, Artnet, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing at New York University.

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Jordan talks to writer and artist Leanne Shapton about her workspace, her desire to create something large, and being fascinated by the recurring image of Lady Diana getting out of cars.

MENTIONED:

When Diana Met…hosted by Aminatou Sow

Spencer (2021)

Be Holding: A Poem by Ross Gay

Doubting Thomas

Leanne Shapton is an author, artist and publisher based in New York City. She is the co-founder, with photographer Jason Fulford, of J&L Books, an internationally-distributed not-for-profit imprint specializing in art and photography books. Shapton is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Shapton's Swimming Studies won the 2012 National Book Critic's Circle Award for autobiography, and was long listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2012. She is also the author of Guestbook: Ghost Stories, Important Artifacts…, Was She Pretty? and several others.

For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com!

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Jordan talks to the incomparable Rita Dove about discovery, about taking a break from creating and publishing, and about re-learning to hold a pen again after her MS diagnosis.

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her recent works include Playlist for the Apocalypse, Sonata Mulattica, and the National Book Award–shortlisted Collected Poems: 1974–2004. In 2021 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Charlottesville, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

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This episode is presented in collaboration with the 2021 Miami Book Fair. Rita Dove is just one of the many writers from around the world participating in the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. This year's Miami Book Fair takes place online and in person from November 14th to November 21st. Please visit miamibookfair.com for more information, or follow MBF at @miamibookfair

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Jordan talks with Morgan Talty in advance of his debut story collection about moms, storytelling, writing from a teen point of view, and the villain of colonialism.

MENTIONED:

• The Lowering Days by Gregory Brown
• "The Blessing Tobacco"
• The Penobscot Indian Nation
• Superstore

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He received his BA in Native American Studies from Dartmouth College and his MFA in fiction from Stonecoast’s low-residency program. His story collection Night of the Living Rez is forthcoming from Tin House Books (2022), and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty teaches courses in both English and Native American Studies, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing. Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.

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Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their 22 books include For Now, evolution, Afterglow, I Must Be Living Twice/new & selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, 4 Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 Myles received a poetry award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2020 they got the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Thank you to The House of Chanel for sponsoring this episode. Find out more at inside.Chanel.com.

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Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Educated is her first book.

Hosted by Jordan Kisner. Produced by Justin Alvarez and Drew Broussard. Music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud. Art by Kirstin Huber. Presented by Lit Hub Radio.

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Jordan talks to author Alexandra Kleeman about the threshold of the natural and the man-made, about how we are and will continue to consistently cross that threshold back and forth, and about how cognitive science influenced her new book.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Something New Under the Sun as well as Intimations: Stories and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and other writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Born in 1986 in Berkeley, California, she was raised in Colorado and lives in Staten Island with her husband, the writer Alex Gilvarry. She is an Assistant Professor at the New School.

This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.

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It’s the end of our ‘Inheritance' capsule of episodes!

MENTIONED:

• Marie-Helene Bertino shares her summer reading plans (hint: they involve Ursula K. Le Guin)
• Jordan and Drew answer some more listener questions, and Jordan describes the horror of hearing her own voice over and over again
• updates about cool Thresholds alums like Ryka Aoki, Ed Yong, Fernanda Melchor, Sarah Manguso, and Fariha Roisin
• a flashback to Jordan's conversation with Ocean Vuong

We'll be back with our next capsule starting in July!

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The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Thank you to The House of Chanel for sponsoring this episode. Find out more at inside.Chanel.com.

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Lynn Steger Strong’s most recent novel, Want, was one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Books of 2020. Her first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in 2016. Her nonfiction has been published by Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and others. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute.

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While you wait for the next episoe of Thresholds, we wanted to share a preview of a new podcast from our friends over at Wondery.

Looking for a new podcast that's like Olivia Pope meets your favorite Ryan Murphy show? Or do you just love a good scandal? On True Love, a new fiction podcast from Wondery, you'll hear stories of scandalous flings, secret affairs, and the drama that ensues. TRUE LOVE brings these relationships to life through reimagined stories about love, lust and heartbreak. From secret celebrity hookups that play out under the cover of night to the web of lies it took to protect a high profile politician from revealing his secret life, each character finds themselves mixed up in every form of drama imaginable. This is just a preview of True Love, but you can listen to full episodes at wondery.fm/TL_Thresholds.

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It's Infrastructure Week on Thresholds! Kind of! Jordan talks with Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade, about how developing a structure can change your writing life, about the paralysis of options, and creating the character of Francie in her latest book.

Aimee Bender is the author of six books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) which won the SCIBA award for best fiction, and an Alex Award, The Color Master, a NY Times Notable book for 2013, and her latest novel, The Butterfly Lampshade, which came out in July 2020, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and more, as well as heard on PRI’s “This American Life”and “Selected Shorts”. She lives in Los Angeles with her family, and teaches creative writing at USC.

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This episode is presented in collaboration with the 2021 Miami Book Fair. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is just one of the many writers from around the world participating in the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. This year's Miami Book Fair takes place online and in person from November 14th to November 21st. Please visit miamibookfair.com for more information, or follow MBF at @miamibookfair

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I'm sharing a special preview of the new podcast, Well-Read Black Girl from Pushkin Industries. Well-Read Black Girl is the literary kickback you never knew you needed. Glory Edim, author and founder of the Well-Read Black Girl community, sits in deep, honest and close conversation with authors like Tarana Burke, Anita Hill, Gabrielle Union, Elizabeth Acevedo and more. You’ll also meet book club members, literacy advocates, and Black booksellers to hear what they’re reading and what it means to be well-read. In this preview, Glory talks with Korean American author and teacher Min Jin Lee. Min talks about how reading can radicalize young people — in a good way — and how, through storytelling, we can approach a "new reality” by creating a version of the world we want to see. You can listen to Well-Read Black Girl at https://link.chtbl.com/thresholdswrbg.

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Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty) joins Jordan to talk about avoiding mandates, about writing through pain and trauma, and about finding the neutral room in one's own mind.

MENTIONED:

• "Everything is copy" -- Nora Ephron
• sacral agenesis
• Richard Serra

Chloé Cooper Jones is a writer based in New York City. In 2020, Chloé was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing for “Fearing for His Life,” a profile of Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner. She was the recipient of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and the 2021 Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University. Both grants were in support of her debut memoir, Easy Beauty. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the New York Times-bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), and a debut novel, The Border of Paradise, which was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017 and won the Whiting Award in 2018. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she is the founder of The Unexpected Shape Community for ambitious writers living with illness and disability. She can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

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In this episode, Jordan talks to Rivka Galchen about the projects she never finishes, how hard it is for her to stay in love with an idea, and how often she throws projects away. They also talk about her most recent novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, which Galchen says came out in a big “love-affair style rush.”

Rivka Galchen is the author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch and is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for The New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of 20 Under 40 American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) and her story collection American Innovations were both New York Times Best Books of the Year. She has received an MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Galchen lives in New York City.

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• Try MUBI for 30 Days at MUBI.com/Thresholds.

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Thresholds reaches its centenary episode with equal parts celebration and consideration. We reached out to old friends to leave us some voicemails, Jordan wrote a musing on this particular milestone, and we're doing a little giveaway to celebrate all of you who've helped bring us this far along the path.

Mentioned:

• "Notebook, 1981," by Eileen Myles
• The Isolation Journals by Suleika Jaouad

Thanks to all of our guests, to our team, and to you listeners! Here's to many more, in 2023 and beyond!

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Jordan talks to Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks: A Memoir, about the familial revelations that inspired the book, about her journey through (and reclamation of) madness, and about coming to embrace the forces that have shaped her life.

Nadia Owusu is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. Her first book, Aftershocks: A Memoir was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and topped several best-of lists in 2020. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay, So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Lily, Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Catapult, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. By day, Nadia is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions. She is a graduate of Pace University (BA) and Hunter College (MS). She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Mountainview low-residency program where she now teaches. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Jordan talks to Katie Kitamura about the process of writing, the challenge of calling yourself a writer, and being a slow-moving creature in a world that wants to go fast.

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. It was recently named one of the New York Times' Top 10 Books of 2021 and it was also longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a Barack Obama Summer Reading selection. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages and is being adapted for film and television. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and Santa Maddalena, Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

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Big News: novelist/memoirist/wonderful human Mira Jacob will be stepping into the host chair this spring! This week, she and Jordan sit down for a pass-the-baton chat -- kicking off with a flashback to the very first Thresholds episode (and interview) from February 2020.

MENTIONED:

• Mira's Thresholds interview
• "What You Might Not Know About 'Getting Roofied'" by Jordan Kisner
• Mira in conversation with Saeed Jones and Kiese Laymon for Bookable

Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic. Her graphic memoir Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, and Library Journal. It is currently in development as a television series with Film 44. Her novel The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, and the Telegraph. She is currently the visiting professor at MFA Creative Writing program at The New School, and a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

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Legendary cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From) joins Mira to talk about building a life out of odd jobs, the double-edged sword of being ‘the first,’ and how being a cartoonist was never on her mind until it happened.

MENTIONED:

• Brumsic Brandon, Jr. (Barbara’s father, creator of the comic Luther) 
• Marie Brown
• Jules Feiffer’s Village Voice strip
• Women’s Wear Daily

Barbara Brandon-Croft was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. After debuting her comic strip Where I’m Coming From in the Detroit Free Press in 1989, Brandon-Croft became the first Black woman cartoonist to be published nationally by a major syndicate. During its 15 year run, Where I’m Coming From appeared in over 65 newspapers across the USA and Canada, as well as Jamaica, South Africa, and Barbados. Her comics are in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. Brandon-Croft lives in Queens.

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Mira chats with novelist Angie Cruz (How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water) about figuring out who you want to be, Angie's semi-secret history in fashion design and painting, the arrival of her character Cara Romero in her life, and questioning the truths of America in these most trying of times.

MENTIONED:

• FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology)
• Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
• Jazz by Toni Morrison
• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022). Her novel, Dominicana was the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee and the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including the Lighthouse Fellowship, Siena Art Institute, and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Fellowship. She’s published shorter works in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast and other journals. She's the founder and Editor-in-chief of the award winning literary journal, Aster(ix) and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York and Turin.

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Sam Lipsyte (No One Left to Come Looking For You) joins Jordan to talk about giving up on punk rock, rediscovering a passion for writing, and the revelation that if you realize nobody cares, then you can do the thing that makes you happy.

MENTIONED:

• Dungbeetle
• Riverbank State Park
• John Cheever
• Galaxie 500

Sam Lipsyte's latest novel is No One Left to Come Looking For You. He is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

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Jordan sits down to a wild, funny, moving conversation with violinist, composer, Bad Seed, and author of Nina Simone's Gum Warren Ellis. It's an honest examination of where Warren's new book came from, how he learned how to write it, and why the potato is the miracle of the tuber world.

Warren Ellis is an Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer, most famous for his work as collaborator and bandmate of Nick Cave, in both the Bad Seeds and Grinderman. Both solo and alongside Nick he is also a multi-award-winning film composer whose soundtracks include The Proposition, The Road, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mustang and most recently This Train I Ride. His own band Dirty Three have released eight studio albums since 1994 and he is an in-demand producer and writer, working with artists including Marianne Faithful, Jupiter and Okwess and Tinariwen.

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Jordan talks to writer Eula Biss about living in the moment of a threshold, about buying a house, about making a career, and about how too much fertile ground for thought can lead to overload.

Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her book On Immunity was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism in 2009. Her work has recently appeared in the Guardian, the Paris Review, Freeman’s, The Believer, and The New Yorker.

This episode is brought to you by the House of CHANEL, creator of the iconic J12 sports watch. Always in motion, the J12 travels through time without ever losing its identity.

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Jordan talks with poet/performer/advocate Kay Ulanday Barrett about their decision to get top surgery, the intersection of family and food, and writing through health crises.

MENTIONED:

• Grey’s Anatomy
• Swype
• The Asian American Writers Workshop
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Kay Ulanday Barrett aka @Brownroundboi is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have received residencies from Tin House as a 2022 Next Book Winner as well as MacDowell as a 2020 James Baldwin Fellow. Other residencies include: Drunken Boat, VONA Voices, Monson Arts, and The Lambda Literary Review. Barrett is a three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia University, Northwestern, The School of the Art Institute, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, them., Colorlines, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, to name a few. Currently, they remix their mama’s recipes and live in Jersey City with their jowly dog. kaybarrett.net

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