Podcast
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin · EN
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, non-fiction, essay, and poetry writers. First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing highlights the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. This weekly show hosted by Mitzi Rapkin is a celebration of creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
58episodes
Episodes
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First Draft - Andrew Porter (returns)
Jul 7, 202501:03:54Tap to summarizeAndrew 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - André Alexis
Jun 30, 202501:05:13Tap to summarizeAndré 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - 12th Anniversary Best of - Salar Abdoh
Jun 27, 202501:06:21Tap to summarizeSalar 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Lori Ostlund
Jun 23, 202501:07:10Tap to summarizeLori Ostlund is the author of After the Parade, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her third book is called Are You Happy? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Vauhini Vara
Apr 28, 2025Tap to summarizeVauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Her new nonfiction book is called Searches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
Apr 21, 2025Tap to summarizeLisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator. Born in Tokyo, and raised in Texas, she is the co-translator of Ryke Akutagawa’s Kappa and the translator for Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome. She lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Mai Nardone
May 8, 2023Tap to summarizeMai Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok. His collection is called Welcome Me to the Kingdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Rebecca Kauffman
Apr 18, 2022Tap to summarizeRebecca Kauffman is the author of four novels including The Gunners, which received the Premio Tribuk dei Librai award in Italy, and Chorus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Rebecca Solnit
Nov 8, 2021Tap to summarizeRebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. She is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Whose Story Is This?, Call Them By Their True Names, Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Her new book is Orwell’s Roses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →First Draft - Lori Gottlieb
Jun 22, 2020Tap to summarizeLori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic’s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times and many other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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