Season Two (2024 – 2025)
“I didn’t know you could be a writer”: Iris Jamahl Dunkle on her career as a biographer and poet
September 18, 2024
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an Emerita Poet Laureate of Sonoma County and a faculty member at UC Davis. She has authored two biographies: Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, forthcoming).
“I didn’t seem to be good at anything else”: Ayşegül Savaş on her career as a writer
October 15, 2024
Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels Walking on the Ceiling, White on White, and The Anthropologists. Her first non-fiction book The Wilderness is forthcoming in October. Originally from Turkey, she lives in Paris.
“I learned to pack light and listen deeply”: Cass Marketos on her career as an artist and writer
November 20, 2024
Cass Marketos is a Los Angeles-based compost artist, writer, and community volunteer. She works in her neighborhood to divert food waste from landfills, build and maintain composts with neighbors, and educate students on decay.
“I wasn’t really allowed to”: Noreen Masud on her career as a writer and memoirist
January 21, 2025
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place (Hamish Hamilton [Penguin] and Melville House Press, 2023), was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the…
“I can’t help generating meaning”: Elisa Gabbert on her career as a poet and essayist
February 18, 2025
Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, The Word Pretty, and The Self Unstable. She writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, American…
“I wanted something different”: Mary Jo Bang on her career as a poet and Guggenheim Fellow
March 18, 2025
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno…
“I moved cities, I moved jobs”: Marianne Brooker on her career as a writer and memoirist
April 30, 2025
Marianne Brooker is based in Bristol, where she works for a charity campaigning for climate and social justice. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London and a background in arts research and teaching. She won the 2022 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for Intervals, her first book.
“I’m a multitasker”: Jennifer Baker on her career as an author, editor, and podcaster
May 27, 2025
Jennifer Baker is an author, editor, writing instructor, and creator of the Minorities in Publishing podcast. She’s been a recipient of NYSCA/NYFA and Queens Council on the Arts grants, a 2024 Axinn Writing Award, and was named the Publishers Weekly Star Watch SuperStar in 2019. She is the author of Forgive Me Not (2023), a 2023 Los Angeles Times…
“I had to unlearn to be a high achiever”: Kapka Kassabova on her career as a writer
June 24, 2025
Kapka Kassabova is a multigenre writer of narrative non-fiction, poetry, and fiction. Border, the first book in her Balkan quartet, won a British Academy Prize, the Scottish Book of the Year, the Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year, and the Highland Book Prize. Kassabova grew up in Bulgaria and studied in New Zealand; today, she lives by a river in the Scottish Highlands. Her work has been translated into…
“I’m doing everything I want to do”: Carrie Sun on her career as a writer and memoirist
July 29, 2025
Carrie Sun was born in China and raised in Michigan. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. She lives in Jersey City with her husband and young son. Private Equity: A Memoir is her first book.
“I realized I could see myself there”: Nikkya Hargrove on her career as a writer and memoirist
September 2, 2025
Nikkya Hargrove is a LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow and has written about adoption, marriage, motherhood, and the prison system for The Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, Scary Mommy, and Shondaland. She has worked for social impact nonprofits providing support to underserved communities throughout her professional career…
“I was in a situation that didn’t add up”: Corinne Low on her career as a writer and Wharton economist
September 30, 2025
Corinne Low, PhD, is an associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School, where she teaches an award-winning course on the economics of discrimination. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. She regularly speaks to and advises companies on their practices, and her research has been featured in media outlets from Vanity Fair to the Harvard Business Review. She…
“I essentially rearranged my life”: Emily J. Smith on her career as a writer and novelist
October 28, 2025
Emily J. Smith is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is out now from William Morrow / HarperCollins. She has a BS in computer engineering from Cornell, an MBA from UC Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Curbed, Slate, Hobart, The Washington Post, Vice, and elsewhere. She publishes regularly on…
“I realized that maybe I could be the one”: Anna Malaika Tubbs on her career as a writer and TED speaker
November 25, 2025
Anna Malaika Tubbs is a 2x New York Times bestselling author and multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity. With a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Masters in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelors in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University…
“I went back to what I’d always been passionate about”: Petya K. Grady on her career as a writer, featured Substacker, and UX strategist
December 16, 2025
Petya K. Grady is a writer and UX strategist. Now entering its sixth year, her popular literary newsletter, A Reading Life, has been named a Substack Featured Publication. Originally from Bulgaria, she lives in Memphis with her family.
“I was going to do whatever I wanted”: Stephanie Wambugu on her career as a writer and editor
December 30, 2025
Stephanie Wambugu is the author of the novel Lonely Crowds. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Granta Magazine, The Drift, The Nation, Bookforum and elsewhere. She was born in Mombasa, Kenya and lives and works in New York.
Season One (2023)
“I discovered that regular jobs made me miserable”: Candace Savage on her career as a writer
June 6, 2023
Candace Savage is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books for adults and children, including Strangers in the House, A Geography of Blood, and Prairie: A Natural History. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, she was inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute at…
“I always feel like I’m racing against the clock”: Kasia Van Schaik on her career as a writer and poet
June 20, 2023
Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the linked story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth, which explores what it means to come of age in a time of ecological crisis, and which was a finalist for the 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, The Rumpus, Maisonneuve Magazine…
“I remember laughter and a sense of discovery”: Miranda Dunham-Hickman on her career as a writer and professor
July 4, 2023
Miranda Dunham-Hickman specializes in modernist literature at McGill University, where she is Associate Professor of English and current director of the Poetry Matters initiative. She is recipient of the Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching for the Faculty of Arts and McGill’s Carrie M. Derick Award for Graduate Supervision and…
“I believed, from the start, in hard work”: Beth Kephart on her career as a writer
July 25, 2023
Beth Kephart, a National Book Award finalist, is the author, most recently, of My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) and Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life (Juncture Workshops). As the author of nearly forty books in multiple genres, Kephart has been named a winner of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts…
“I started to connect the dots”: Charlene SanJenko on her career as an Indigenous storyteller and social impact entrepreneur
August 15, 2023
Charlene SanJenko is a social impact entrepreneur with two decades as an impact producer under her belt. An Indigenous storyteller and media visionary, she was born in the Splatsin Band of the Shuswap Nation.
“I resisted my own dreams”: Sheila Liming on her career as a writer and professor
September 5, 2023
Sheila Liming is associate professor at Champlain College and the author, most recently, of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. Her writing has appeared in publications like The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Globe and Mail.
“I did not think I was following any kind of path”: Nancy K. Miller on her career as a writer and professor
September 26, 2023
Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center (CUNY), where she teaches life writing and cultural criticism. Among her books dealing with questions about women, letters, feminism, and memoir are Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (1991), Bequest and…
“I’ve been able to find my way”: Jenna Butler on her career as a writer and scholar
October 17, 2023
Dr. Jenna Butler (she/her) writes, teaches, and grows in northern Treaty 6 by the Paddle River. She is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion; a collection of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail; and the Arctic travelogue Magnetic North: Sea…
“I never considered any other path”: Frances Dickey on her career as a writer and professor
November 7, 2023
Frances Dickey is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and the author or editor of several books including The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: Volume 3, 1927-29, The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, and several volumes of the…
We’ll see you again soon.
November 28, 2023
While this first season of Women of Letters is coming to a close, I couldn’t be more excited about all that’s to come in future seasons.