Podcast
Thresholds
Hosted by Jordan Kisner · EN
This is Thresholds, a series of interviews with writers and artists you love about the transformative experiences (surprises, crises, existential freakouts, u-turns, breakthroughs) that have shaped their work. The life-wasn’t-the-same-after-that moments. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection THIN PLACES. Thresholds is a co-production between Black Mountain Institute and Literary Hub. www.thisisthresholds.com
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19episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Valeria Luiselli
Mar 2000:38:25Tap to summarizeJordan sits down with Valeria Luiselli to talk about the U.S.-Mexico border, and in particular its origin point (or terminus) in the Pacific Ocean. They discuss Luiselli's forays into sound art with her new project "Echos from the Borderlands", her choice to set her next novel in Sicily, and the humor of whale song. Valeria Luiselli is the author of Sidewalks (2013), Faces in the Crowd (2014), The Story of My Teeth (2015), Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and Lost Children Archive (2019). She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. Her next book, a novel titled Beginning Middle End, will be published by Random House in July 2026. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Aracelis Girmay (& an announcement)
Mar 1200:43:02Tap to summarizeIn the penultimate episode of the series, Jordan sits down to talk with poet Aracelis Girmay about the way that reading --especially discovering the works of Toni Morrison as a teenager-- changed her life. Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes works across genres. She is the author of the poetry collections GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA, 2025), the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). She is the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Jayson Greene (Live!)
Mar 600:46:29Tap to summarizeJordan sits down with author Jayson Greene during a live taping of Thresholds at the Beverly Theater in Las Vegas, Nevada. The two talk about Jayson's new novel, UnWorld, the uncanniness of grief, the instability of memory, and how presciently his novel anticipated the way AI is changing human intimacy.Jayson Greene is an author, music critic and editor. He has served as a senior editor of Pitchfork and is the author of Once More We Saw Stars, a memoir about the death of his two-year-old daughter, in 2015. His novel, UnWorld, is out now from Random House.Special thanks to our partners at the Black Mountain Institute for hosting this conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Tayari Jones
Feb 2500:49:52Tap to summarizeJordan sits down to talk with bestselling novelist Tayari Jones about the power and satisfaction of moving back home after decades away, and how her new novel, KIN, changed the scope of her work. Mentioned in the episode:Beaches Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson RoundtreeTayari Jones is the author of four novels, including the international bestseller, AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE. Her new novel, out this month, is KIN. She is the winner of the Women’s Prize, Aspen Words Prize and NAACP Image award. She is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and the A.D White Professor at large at Cornell University. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →
Introducing: "Borrowed & Returned" from the Brooklyn Public Library
Oct 1700:28:13Tap to summarizeThresholds is happy to introduce "Borrowed & Returned," a new podcast from the Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed America. This episode was made in partnership between Borrowed & Returned and Thresholds. You can hear the whole interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in our feed.Episode description: When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about nature. For the first time, the environment was not just something out there that could be tracked and measured, but something that lived inside all of us. Hear more of Borrowed & Returned at https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Oct 800:37:24Tap to summarizeJordan sits down with marine biologist, writer, and climate advocate Ayana Johnson to talk about her mission to fight climate fatalism, her love of Rachel Carson, and her skepticism of the impulse to look for "hope" in the face of climate change -- as opposed to possibility, or joy.Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and teacher working to help create the best possible climate future. She is co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities, and is the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College. She authored The New York Times bestseller What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures. Previously, she co-edited the climate anthology All We Can Save, co-founded The All We Can Save Project, and co-created and co-hosted the Spotify/Gimlet climate solutions podcast How to Save a Planet. She also co-authored the Blue New Deal, a roadmap for including the ocean in climate policy. Previously, as executive director of the Waitt Institute, she co-founded the Blue Halo Initiative and led the Caribbean’s first successful island-wide ocean zoning effort. Early in her career, she developed U.S. federal ocean policy at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Claire Vaye Watkins
Oct 100:57:21Tap to summarizeJordan sits down with Claire Vaye Watkins to talk about how the grief over her mother's death diffused into a homesickness for the landscape of the Mojave Desert, where she grew up, and the way that that singular landscape then formed her own writing style, which the New Yorker dubbed "Nevada Gothic." They also talk about postpartum depression, Watkins' autofiction novel I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, and hauntings.Claire Vaye Watkins was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” and one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists." She is the author of I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, Watkins is also the co-director of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Mariana Enriquez
Sep 2400:44:34Tap to summarizeThis week, Jordan sits down with the "queen of Latin American gothic horror," Mariana Enriquez, to talk about the manuscript she burned and how it led her to search for a mode of horror writing that was drawn from her own lived experiences of terror. Mentioned: Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, gravestones as monuments, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave.Mariana Enriquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. She has published in English the novel Our Share of Night and three story collections, A Sunny Place for Shady People, Things We Lost in the Fire, and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. Her most recent book is a work of nonfiction: Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Miriam Toews
Sep 1700:48:51Tap to summarizeJordan sits down to talk with Miriam Toews about her new book, A Truce That Is Not Peace, her first nonfiction book, and the events that inspired it: the death by suicide of her father and then, later, her sister. They talk about the long periods of silence her father and sister both went through when they were alive, and how Toews' own persistent need to "arrange sentences" pushes back against their silences. Also discussed: grandkids, the whipsaw between horror and hilarity in her work, and the Mennonite community in which she was raised. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →Renee Gladman
Jun 2500:42:49Tap to summarizeJordan sits down with Renee Gladman to talk about prose architecture, Henry James, walking in cities, and mushrooms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcribe →