Date: May 2, 2022
I met Kristen Millares Young at Fort Worden, an Indigenous gathering place taken by the federal government, which installed concrete bunkers in the cliffs overlooking Salish Sea. Decommissioned for military […]
Date: May 2, 2022
A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.
Date: April 21, 2022
Date: April 21, 2022
Date: April 14, 2022
Shout out to all the book clubs: Don’t let this be the winter of your discontent! There are so many good books out there just waiting to be embraced this […]
Date: April 13, 2022
CONGRATULATIONS, Khalisa, on a well-deserved win! For the full list of winners, click below!
Date: April 12, 2022
Dear Listener, For this, our 99th episode, Rachel welcomes poet, interdisciplinary artist, and professor Douglas Kearney to Commonplace. This conversation, recorded in early November 2021, has been a long time […]
Date: April 12, 2022
Kathryn interviews Author Kim Dower. Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, Kim Dower’s poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid. Culled from her four […]
Date: April 7, 2022
In 2003, I was a pre-med undergraduate at UC Berkeley majoring in philosophy and taking poetry classes on the side—totally scattered, that is to say: lost, alive, lonely, and away […]
Date: April 7, 2022
Bill welcomes poet Kim Dower to the show. Kim, the City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood (October 2016 – October 2018), has published four collections of poetry: Air Kissing on Mars, described by […]
Date: August 7, 2025
This is not a reading book, however, it does encourage children to use their imaginations and “think outside the box.” That skill will help them later in life with critical […]
Date: August 5, 2025
Troubled lives intersect in the Indian Ocean with explosive results in Lutz’s tantalizing follow-up to Born Slippy. Frank Baltimore worked in construction until one of his employees started laundering money and […]
Date: August 4, 2025
A poignant and profoundly relevant examination of society’s safe places. In this essay collection, Kalfopoulou explores the notion of refuge in all its varied facets. “Embedded in the word refugee […]
Date: July 24, 2025
Four stories merge into one in this tale of politics and greed set in the Indian Ocean. No one can trust anyone in this incendiary tale of murder, espionage, and […]
Date: June 30, 2025
Twelve years ago, Andrew Lam, a writer and journalist who left Vietnam as “a plane person” at the end of the Vietnam War at the age of eleven, published Birds of Paradise […]
Date: June 18, 2025
In Stories from the Edges of the Sea, Andrew Lam writes not from the center of trauma but from its quieter afterlives. These are not conventional Vietnamese refugee stories. They emerge […]
Date: June 17, 2025
The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Molly Olguín’s debut collection, are remarkable for the ways in which they skate between the weird and the mundane, the ordinary and […]
Date: June 12, 2025
In her second poetry collection, Didi Jackson shifts among lyrical strategies, sometimes earthy and elsewhere mystical. An assistant professor at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, she spends part of the year in […]
Date: May 27, 2025
The relationship between Ceto—a siren who left her sisters and the ocean behind—and her 15-year-old daughter, Naia, is tested when Sirenland, their seaside burlesque attraction, is threatened by the untimely […]
Date: May 22, 2025
In James, Percival Everett’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the character James writes, “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.” By doing […]
