Books on the Bed

This week we visit with Reena Shah on Roosevelt Island in New York City. 

Reena Shah is the author of Every Happiness, her debut novel. Her work has been featured in the Masters Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, BBC, the American Prospect, National Geographic, and the Guardian, among other publications. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, Millay Arts, T...

This week we visit with Helen Whybrow at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont. 

Helen Whybrow is the author of The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life (Longlisted for the National Book Award & Winner of the Vermont Book Award), A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800–1900. She is also the editor of many anthologies, including Hearth: A ...

This week we visit with Elisa Faison in Carrboro, North Carolina. 

Elisa Faison is a writer and freelance editor living in Carrboro, North Carolina with her partner and two-year-old twins. Her debut novel SKIN CONTACT will be published on June 23, 2026. She has published stories in The Missouri Review, Electric Literature, Smokelong Quarterly, and more. Her story “Motherlove” was the recipient of the 2024 Peden Pri...

This week we visit with Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in BOMB, C Mag, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse, and elsewhere, as well as in the chapbooks Mayonnaise ...

This week we visit with Alison Lyn Miller in Athens, Georgia.

Alison Lyn Miller grew up in Hartwell, Georgia, and worked as a magazine editor in New York City and Dallas before moving to Athens, Georgia, in 2017. In 2020, she started reporting and writing about independent professional wrestlers around the state and published pieces in Sports Illustrated and Gravy. Her first book, Rough House (W.W. Norton, Jan. ’26), set in G...

This week we visit with Alice Martin in Waynesville, North Carolina.

Alice Martin is a writer, reader, and teacher from North Carolina. She holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University and works as an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters....

This week we visit with Nathaniel Roy in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

Nathaniel Roy is a book designer, collage maker, photo taker, self-publisher, and a few other things.

He's a graphic designer who specializes in book design, but for the right cause, he'll design just about anything. He's keenly interested in local, independent, and non-profit projects and is currently an in-house designer at the Ann Arbor District Library and avai...

This week we visit with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in Asheville, North Carolina. 

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from rural Woodland, North Carolina. She's a graduate of Meredith College and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her debut short story collection Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff. Her stories have appeared in The Oxford A...

This week we visit with Nilo Tabrizy in Brooklyn, New York.

Nilo Tabrizy is the co-author (with Fatemeh Jamalpour) of For the Sun After Long Nights, a moving exploration of the 2022 women-led protests in Iran, as told through the interwoven stories of two Iranian journalists. She is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post working for the visual forensics team, where she covers Iran using open-source methods. Previousl...

This week we visit with Tessa Fontaine in Asheville, North Carolina. 

Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts and The Red Grove, her debut novel. Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa teaches in Warren Wilson’s MFA program, started Salt Lake City’s Writers in the Schools program, and has taught in jails and prisons for years. She co-founded and teaches the Accountability Wor...

This week we visit with Andrea L. Rogers in Mountainburg, Arkansas. 

Andrea L. Rogers is an award-winning author of historical and contemporary fiction across a variety of genres. Her first book, Mary and the Trail of Tears is historical fiction, which is pretty much horror for Native people. It was on both the NPR & American Indians in Children’s Literature best of 2020 lists.

This week we visit with Michael Amos Cody in Johnson City, Tennessee. 

Michael Amos Cody was born in the South Carolina Lowcountry and raised in the North Carolina highlands. He spent his twenties writing songs in Nashville and his thirties in school. He’s the author...

This week we visit with Nic Brown in Clemson, South Carolina. 

Nic Brown is a writer and a musician. He has published several books, including the memoir Bang Bang Crash (Counterpoint 2023), which was named a book of the year by Library Journal and Booklist, and the novels In Every Way (Counterpoint 2015), Doubles (Counterpoint 2010), and Floodmarkers (Counterpoint 2009), which was selected as...

This week we visit with Toni Jensen in Springdale, Arkansas. 

Toni Jensen’s Carry is a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land and Indigenous women’s lives (Ballantine 2020). An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen's essays have appeared in Orion, Catapultand Ecotone. She is also the author of the short story collection From the Hilltop. She teaches at the University of Arkansas and the ...

This week we visit with Damon Young in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh writer DAMON YOUNG’s debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays (Ecco), won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His new book, That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor released on June 3rd, 2025. A founder of the culture blog Very Smart Brothas and cr...

This week we visit with Kevin Brockmeier in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. 

In addition to his latest book, The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels&nbs...

This week we visit with Jen Fawkes in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. 

Jen Fawkes is the author of Daughters of Chaos, a literary alternate history in which a female Union spy discovers a secret society of magical women that spans millennia. Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link called Daughters of Chaos "ferociously, radiantly compelling," and according to Publishers Weekly's starre...

This week we visit with Amy Le Ann Richardson in Carter County, Kentucky.

Amy Le Ann Richardson earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University (‘09) and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Make Believe Worlds We Built Together (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and Who You Grow Into (Finishing Line Press, 2024), as well as a full collection, Out...

This week we visit with Kristen Renee Miller in Louisville, Kentucky.

KRISTEN RENEE MILLER is the director and editor-in-chief at Sarabande Books. An award-winning poet and translator, she is a 2023 NEA Fellow and the translator of two books from the French by Ilnu Nation poet Marie-Andrée Gill. She is the recipient of honors from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, AIGA, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Gu...