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T. Geronimo Johnson is the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville, longlisted for the National Book Award and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence; and Hold It ’Til It Hurts, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He won the inaugural Joyce Carol Oates Award, the Rome Prize, Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and the William Saroyan International Prize, received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he later taught writing, and has held Stegner and Iowa Arts fellowships. His new novel is The Occidental Book of the Dead. You can support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. Your support contributes to the existence of this podcast and offers you ad-free, pitch-free episodes plus extras each month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times best-seller and selection of Oprah's Book Club that was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate; one of the year’s best by NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and Amazon. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times best-seller and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the quarter century. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine. His new book is called The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia. Support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. No ads, plus extras like cuts from the interviews not in this episode, writing tips from guests and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margrét Ann Thors is a writer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Originally from Fairfield County, Connecticut, she holds a BA, MA, and MFA from Columbia University and teaches at the University of Iceland. In 2025, she earned her PhD with an emphasis on literature after 9/11. Her creative writing has been published in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, Ós Pressan, Storychord, and other outlets. Her debut novel is FREYJA. Support First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing on Patreon. No ads, plus extras like cuts from the interviews not in this episode, writing tips from guests and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018–21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, he is the author of nine novels, five of which have been long- or shortlisted for the Booker Prize, most recently Old God’s Time. His work has won numerous awards in Ireland, the UK, and France, including the Costa Book of the Year Award, the Walter Scott Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In the US, his novels have been recognized by the ALA Carnegie Medal (longlist), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (shortlist), and the High Plains Book Award (winner). He lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.  His new novel is The Newer World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. Her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. She composed and recited "Praise Song for the Day" for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and is currently president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities. Her new work is called Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roberta Rossella Recchia was born in Rome and  lived for a time in Lille, France, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations and cultures. She worked for ten years for a big company and then quit office work to devote herself to teaching. She currently teaches English in a high school in Rome. She is passionate about film and literature, especially Russian and French. She lives with her chihuahua, Claudio, in a small town on the coast of Lazio, Italy. Her new novel is All That Is Left of Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel, The Hunters(1957), led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel, A Sport and a Pastime (1967), was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.” His latest book, All That Is, was published to critical acclaim in 2013. He died in 2015.  This interview was recorded in November 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth and Your Face in Mine as well as a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.  His short story collections include The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost and the newly published Storyknife. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction among other honors. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program in the Department of English at NYU and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwam Um School of Zen.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Russo is the author of 11 novels, including most recently, Under the Falls, Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is currently a professor in the practice at Yale University. His new book is Unsayable: A Life in Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, multimedia artist, memoirist and novelist. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poets and Writers, and Best American Poetry, among others. Some of her poetry collections include Miracle Arrhythmia, Mule and Pear, Seeing the Body, and Lighting the Shadow. Griffiths’ hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a finalist the 2020 NAACP Image award. Her debut novel, Promise was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year. Her memoir is called The Flower Bearers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Powers’ books, including The Yellow Birds, A Line in the Sand, A Shout in the Ruins and poetry collection Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix littéraire du Monde prix étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other recognitions. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and later held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Powers is a U.S. Army veteran of the war in Iraq. His new novel is Children of the Wild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Dave is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me, Eight Hundred Grapes and six other novels. Her books have been published in thirty-nine languages and have been chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, Indie Next, Book of the Month Club, The Richard and Judy Book Club, Best of Amazon, and Best of Apple Books. The Last Thing He Told Me was chosen as the Goodreads Mystery & Thriller of the Year for 2021. Her new novel, The First Time I Saw Him is a sequel to The Last Thing He Told Me, both of which are series on Apple TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. She lives in Austin, Texas. Her novel is A Real Animal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir; The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller, Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN-USA Award; Sanctuary, a New York Times Editor’s Pick; and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. Emily Rapp Black has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation; the Jentel Arts Foundation; the Corporation of Yaddo; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a winter writing fellow among other awards. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine. Her new nonfiction book is called I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truthtelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices