First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Latest Episodes:

First Draft - Joy Harjo Aug 18, 2025

Show notes

Joy Harjo was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She is the author of more than ten books of poetry including Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years and the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise, which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner. Her new book is Washing My Mother’s Body: A Ceremony for Grief.

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First Draft - Princess Joy L. Perry Aug 11, 2025

Show notes

Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia. Her new novel is This Here is Love.

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First Draft - Ed Park Aug 04, 2025

Show notes

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. His debut story collection is An Oral History of Atlantis.

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First Draft - Torrey Peters Jul 28, 2025

Show notes

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book of short stories is called Stag Dance. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Marta, Colombia.

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First Draft - 12th Anniversary Best of - Sue Monk Kidd Jul 25, 2025

Show notes

Sue Monk Kidd writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, The Invention of Wings, and The Book of Longings. Some of her non-fiction titles include The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. In this episode we discuss her new novel The Book of Longings

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First Draft - Kristin Koval Jul 21, 2025

Show notes

Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and Park City, Utah with her husband, two sons and two Great Danes. Her novel is called Penitence.

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First Draft - Robert Macfarlane Jul 14, 2025

Show notes

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer internationally known for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. They have been translated into more than 30 languages and won many prizes around the world and have been adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays and films including river and mountain. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forester Prize for literature. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge England where he is a fellow at Emmanual College, Cambridge.

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First Draft - Andrew Porter (returns) Jul 07, 2025

Show notes

Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days, which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the San Antonio Express News’s “Fictional Work of the Year,” the short story collection The Disappeared, which was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the novel The Imagined Life.

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First Draft - André Alexis Jun 30, 2025

Show notes

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. His new collection is Other Worlds.

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First Draft - 12th Anniversary Best of - Salar Abdoh Jun 27, 2025

Show notes

Salar Abdoh is the author of Out of Mesopotamia, Tehran at Twilight, Opium, and The Poet Game, and editor and translator of the celebrated crime collection, Tehran Noir. He divides his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran. He is a professor at the City University of New York’s City College campus in Harlem, where he teaches in the English Department’s MFA program and also directs undergraduate creative writing. His new novel is called A Nearby Country Called Love.

We talked about the influences on his creativity, masculinity, life in Iran, gender and gayness, writing stories close to home, and finding love and belonging.

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