The Greenlight Bookstore Podcast

Acclaimed YA authors Renee Watson and Ellen Hagan open for poet and Greenlight neighbor Mahogany L. Browne as she launches debut YA book, Chlorine Sky!  Hagan reads from her forthcoming Reckless, Glorious Girl and Watson reads from her forthcoming Love is a Revolution to set the stage for Browne's reading from Chlorine Sky.  All three authors then come together to talk about the power of friendship (as young girls the age of their books' protagonists, and as adult writers); flexing the different writing muscles of YA narrative and verse; and celebrating the ordinary beauties of girlhood and Blackness. (Recorded January 25, 2021)

Author and historian Janice P. Nimura launches her new book, The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women—and Women to Medicine, in conversation with Emily Silverman of The Nocturnists.  Nimura contextualizes the often simplified story of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell (among the first women in the U.S. to earn medical degrees and the founders of the first hospital staffed by women), and discusses the sisters' astonishing trailblazing, their complicated relationship with feminism, and their differences from one another. (Recorded January 19, 2021)

Novelist Min Jin Lee and scholar Jennifer Buehler, who both contributed writing to the new Penguin Classics edition of The Great Gatsby, explore Fitzgerald's iconic American novel on the occasion of the publication of the new edition.  Lee and Buehler discuss how their experience of Gatsby has evolved over time, the novel's deep-seated ethics and relation to American capitalism, queer readings of the text, and how the novel can give students permission to talk about race and sexuality in classroom discussions. (Recorded January 14, 2021)

Bloomsbury editor Daniel Loedel launches his debut novel Hades, Argentina with a resonant conversation with National Book Award-winning novelist Phil Klay. Set during Argentina's Dirty War and partially based on Loedel's family history, the book serves as a starting place for conversation about the ethics of representing traumatic historical events in writing, how morally ambiguous characters challenge and unsettle our view of the world, and love in times of war. (Recorded January 13, 2021)

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge talks with friend and fellow journalist Sarah Smarsh about his new book Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s. Maharidge has written about the American working class for decades, and the conversation ranges from the 1960s to the present exploring the intersections of poverty, technology, gender, and American self-image, including both raw first-hand experience and informed analysis in a bleak picture that yet offers a glimmer of hope. (Recorded January 12, 2021)

In this rich and powerful conversation, Robert Jones (creator of Son of Baldwin) launches his highly anticipated novel The Prophets in conversation with his friend and mentor Kiese Laymon. Jones addresses the necessity of depicting physical love in his story of black queer love in the era of slavery, the fierce brilliance of black women including the authors that influenced Jones, thoughts on the publishing process, and the “love and anger” he hopes that readers take from this novel, in a discussion charged with grief, joy, and mutual admiration. (Recorded January 5, 2021)

Award-winning novelist Charles Yu is joined by his friend, sci fi and fantasy author Charlie Jane Anders, to discuss Yu's novel Interior Chinatown, newly published in paperback and awarded the National Book Award just two weeks before this discussion!  Their conversation touches on metafiction, working in TV, satire in 2020, subjectivity (especially for those who aren't often granted it), being a protagonist vs. being a narrator, and being the only Asian American in the room, and includes a brilliant image of the artist as musician: "the instrument you play makes a sound that only you can make." (Recorded December 1, 2020)

Beloved poets Tina Chang (Hybrida) and Aimee Nezhukumatathil (World of Wonders) discuss their latest books, both of which meditate on the themes of race, motherhood, and home through different lenses. The two authors discuss the challenges of writing in a world in which they didn't see the voices of Asian women being published, the process of setting aside the language forms that they had learned in school and learning how to create their own forms, the challenges of writing during the pandemic, and the effect of their writing on their families, as well as offering welcome advice for writers in the virtual audience. (Recorded November 24, 2020)

Greenlight Bookstore events director Jessica Stockton Bagnulo interviews Jason Reynolds and Danica Novgorodoff about Novgorodoff's graphic novel adaptation of Reynold's award-winning young adult novel, Long Way Down.  Their generous and brilliant conversation on craft and content explores the process of translating the novel's verse to the graphic novel, the complicated context of masculinity and violence particularly in Black communities with generations of trauma, the challenges of visually depicting violence realistically but not gratuitously, and an unforgettable story about a teacher and a goldfish. (Recorded November 17, 2020)

Two literary authors discuss their new horror-tinged graphic novels: Laura Marks on her blood-soaked 19th-century tale Daphne Byrne and Carmen Maria Machado on her spooky small-town story The Low, Low Woods. The authors talk about the connections between memoir, screenwriting, and comics writing, the rewards of working with a graphic artist on interpreting their work, and the space for ambiguity and suspense that the graphic novel form offers for horror stories, in this warm-hearted reading and discussion.  (Recorded November 16, 2020)