Otherppl with Brad Listi

Zulema Renee Summerfield is the guest. Her debut novel, Every Other Weekend, is available in trade paperback from Back Bay Books.Summerfield holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and her work has appeared in a number of literary journals. She is also the author of a book of flash fiction, Everything Faces All Ways At Once (Fourteen Hills Press).In addition to her writing, Summerfield is an educator and creative coach and is one half of Thoughts & Feelings. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a collection of short stories and a new novel.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Cantwell is the guest. Her new poetry collection, All the Emergency-Type Structures, is available from Inlandia Institute.Cantwell lives in Claremont, CA, where she teaches Humanities at The Webb Schools. She has a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including DIAGRAM, The Cincinnati Review, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart, and The Missouri Review. Her first book of poems, Nights I Let The Tiger Get You (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), was a finalist for the 2012 Hudson Prize; she is also the author of a chapbook, Premonitions (Grey Book Press, 2014). ​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Popescu is the guest. His debut novel, Nima, is available from Unnamed Press.Popescu is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, Marketplace, Playboy, Fast Company, Scientific American, Outside,The Guardian, New Scientist, Los Angeles Magazine, and others.His journalism has focused on a wide range, from business, the internet and the arts, to vanishing cultures and wildlife, reporting from places threatened by climate change, globalism, and the march of technology. In 2013, he climbed 18,000 feet up Mount Everest, covering the impact of tourism on the land and local Nepali people for the BBC. That experience would inspire his debut novel, NIMA, published in late May, 2019, from Unnamed Press.He's tracked mountain lions in urban LA, polar bears in Northern Canada, covered Arctic tsunamis, glacial melt and erosion in Greenland and Alaska, and spent time in drought-plagued East Africa and Indonesia, places and people at the vanguard of this world shift. Heads of state in Mexico, politicos tasked with governing alongside narcos, Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, founders of Instagram, Twitter, Tinder, real cyborgs, convicts, dissidents, billionaires, all have been interview subjects. He recently profiled Steven Spielberg for The New York Times.In 2018, Popescu spent weeks in Ladakh, in search of snow leopards in India's Himalayas, sailed to the edge of the globe in the Russian High Arctic and into the deceptively placid Pacific waters of the Galapagos, on assignment for Bloomberg, the Washington Post and New York Times. A year later, he returned to Ladakh and saw a leopard with the naked eye. Popescu holds a master’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and a BA in creative writing from Pitzer College.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robin Page is the guest. Her debut novel, Small Silent Things, is available from Harper Perennial.Page was raised in Cincinnati and has degrees from UCLA and UC Irvine’s MFA program. She is married, has two daughters, and lives in Los Angeles.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Belén Fernández is the guest. Her new book, Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, is available from OR Books. It is the official September pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Belén Fernández ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekking—through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin America—to packing avocados in southern Spain, to close encounters with a variety of unpredictable men, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernández survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling—as of the present moment—continued survival.In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Belén Fernández has established herself as a one of the most trenchant observers of America’s interventions around the world, following in the footsteps of great foreign correspondents such as Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag.She is a contributing editor at Jacobin and graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. She frequently writes for Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Jacobin, and is also the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah M. Broom is the guest. Her debut memoir, The Yellow House, is available now from Grove Press.Broom began her writing career as a newspaper journalist working in Rhode Island, Dallas, New Orleans and Hong Kong (for TIME Asia). She also worked as an editor at O, The Oprah Magazine for several years. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine and elsewhere. In 2016, she received the prestigious Whiting Award for Creative Nonfiction.Broom has an undergraduate degree in anthropology and mass communications from the University of North Texas and a Master’s degree in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. A native New Orleanian, she is the youngest of twelve children, and now makes her home in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dora Malech is the guest. Her most recent poetry collection, Stet, is available from Princeton University Press.Malech's other collections include Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her fourth collection, Flourish, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2020. Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Fund, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize from the Baker Artist Awards, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and she has served as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California. She is a co-founder and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Projects, and she is currently an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimberly King Parsons is the guest. Her debut story collection, Black Light, is available now from Vintage.Born in Lubbock, Texas, Parsons earned a BA in English and an MA in Literary Studies (emphasis on the works of William Faulkner) from the University of Texas at Dallas. She later moved to New York City, where she earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and served as the editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.A recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Josh Gondelman is the guest. His new book, Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results, is available from Harper Perennial (Sept. 17). Gondelman is a writer and comedian who incubated in Boston before moving to New York City, where he currently lives and works as a writer and producer for Desus and Mero on Showtime. Previously, he spent five years at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, first as a web producer and then as a staff writer. In 2016, he made his late night standup debut on Conan (TBS), and he recently made his network tv debut on Late Night With Seth Meyers (NBC).He is the winner of two Peabody Awards, three Emmy awards, and two WGA Awards for his work on Last Week Tonight. He is also the co-author (along with Joe Berkowitz) of the book You Blew It, published October 2015 by Plume. His writing has also appeared in prestigious publications such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

R.O. Kwon is the guest. Her bestselling debut novel, The Incendiaries, is available in trade paperback from Riverhead Books.Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book, Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, and Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize. The book was also nominated for the Aspen Prize, Carnegie Medal, and the Northern California Book Award. Kwon’s next novel, as well as an essay collection, are forthcoming.Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Buzzfeed, NPR, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.In today's monologue, I respond to more mail.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices