Episode #124 – Angela Garbes, author of LIKE A MOTHER
Angela Garbes is a Seattle-based writer specializing in food, bodies, women’s health, and issues of racial equity and diversity. Garbes began writing for The Stranger in 2006, and became a staff writer in 2014. Her piece “The More I Learn About Breast Milk, the More Amazed I Am” is the publication’s most-read piece in its twenty-four-year history, and the inspiration for her book, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. Garbes is an experienced public speaker, frequent radio and podcast guest, and event moderator. She grew up in a food-obsessed, immigrant Filipino household and now lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.
We’re returning after a year-long (!) hiatus with some amazing interview episodes with writer Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother; the poets of Las Peregrinas; a few throwback episodes, and more. Please stay tuned!
Episode #123: John Jennings, illustrator and co-adaptor of Octavia Butler’s KINDRED
John Jennings is Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside. His work centers around intersectional narratives regarding identity politics and popular media. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning essay collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University. Jennings sits on the editorial advisory boards for The Black Scholar and the new Ohio State Press imprint New Suns: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Speculative.
Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of The Education of Margot Sanchez, a contemporary young adult novel forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on February 21, 2017.
She is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner and a 2015 Clarion alumni with a Leonard Pung Memorial Scholarship. She has been awarded fellowships from PEN Center USA, A Room Of Her Own Foundation, and received a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her short story “Death Defiant Bomba” received honorable mention in Bellevue Literary Review’s 2014 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by author Nathan Englander. Lilliam was also a finalist for AWP’s 2014 WC&C Scholarship Competition.
Lilliam’s work has appeared in Tin House, Tahoma Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Latina, USA Today, Cosmo for Latinas, Sundog Lit, Midnight Breakfast, Bellevue Literary Review, The Rumpus.net, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
She hosts a monthly literary radio show, Literary Soundtrack, on RadioSombra.org. Past guests have included Laila Lalami, Victor LaValle, Matt Johnson, Sonia Manzano, Azar Nafisi, among others. She’s also moderated panels for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, PEN Center USA and more.
Debut novelist Jade Chang is the author of The Wangs vs. the World, out on October 4th from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
She has worked as an arts and culture journalist and editor for publications like the BBC, Metropolis, Glamour, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. She was recently an editor at Goodreads. Her first paying job after college was as a researcher for the J. Peterman catalog. (Yes, where Elaine worked on Seinfeld—it’s real!)
Jade is the recipient of a Sundance Arts Journalist fellowship, the AIGA/Winterhouse Design Criticism Award, and a Squaw Valley Writers Workshop scholarship. She lives in Los Angeles.
The Blood-Jet Writing Hour’s mission has always been to “spotlight vibrant and (aesthetically, culturally and linguistically) diverse and underrepresented voices from the literary world.”
We continue stand in solidarity with immigrants, refugees, people of color, LGBTIQ people, women, people with disabilities, women, and the Muslim community. It is more important than ever to amplify these voices.
If you are a poet, artist, writer, critic, and/or educator from these communities, we’d love to invite you to send a recording of a poem, quotation, and/or reading recommendations of refusal, resistance, and love.
You may also reflect on your experiences of recent events in the recording. For those of you who teach poetry/creative writing, how are you going about this in you classroom? For those of you writing/not writing, what are you reflecting on? How are you finding the words?
In the recording, please introduce yourself – you can mention what you do (I.e. educator, writer) and if you’d like, your publications and website/Twitter so folks can find your work. Feel free to record previously published work; just cite the journal / lit mag.
Don’t worry about length. I’ll post them as soon as I receive them.
You can record on your phone on “Voice Memos” or any other convenient recording app, then send it to me (rachelle.a.cruz@gmail.com) as an MP3.
Please feel free to send this request to any other writers/poets who would like to contribute.
Our first video interview with Melissa de la Cruz, author of Something in Between, with guest co-host, Cherisse Nadal!
A little bit about Something in Between:
With her gusty and poignant new novel, Something in Between, #1 New York Times bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz tackles a subject close to her heart. The story of a smart and determined immigrant girl trying to penetrate the American Dream, it is a work of fiction that resides in the reality we live today, showing the human side of debates about immigration reform, citizenship, and what it really means to be an American.
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Melissa de la Cruz is the #1 New York Times, #1 Publisher’s Weekly and #1 Indie Bound bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels for readers of all ages. Her books have also topped the USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists, and have been published in over twenty countries. A former fashion and beauty editor, Melissa has written for The New York Times, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Allure, The San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s, Teen Vogue, CosmoGirl! and Seventeen. She has also appeared as an expert on fashion, trends and fame for CNN, E! and FoxNews. Melissa grew up in Manila and moved to San Francisco with her family, where she graduated high school salutatorian from The Convent of the Sacred Heart. At Columbia University, she majored in art history and English. Today she lives in Los Angeles and Palm Springs with her husband and daughter.
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Cherisse Yanit Nadal is a recipient of PAWA, Inc.’s Manuel G. Flores Prize in Writing and is a 2013 VONA Fellow. Her work has been published in Oatmeal Magazine and featured in Dirty Laundry Lit, Sunday Jump, and Tuesday Night Cafe. She is a former West Coast Correspondent for DC Asian Pacific American Film, Inc. and has also served two years as Assistant Editor at Kaya Press. Cherisse co-created and co-hosted the two-year literary podcasting project Blue Book Buzz. She can often be found singing behind her steering wheel on any number of L.A. freeways. She one-ups Queen Bey by adding tea and chia to the hot sauce in her bag… swag. You can follow her on twitter @cherisseyanit.
In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies – including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants –alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutantsprovides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.
Ramzi Fawaz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
A Writing Podcast with Rachelle Cruz, Muriel Leung and MT Vallarta 