596 The Power of Stories (with J Edward Chamb...

What do Iranians - both home and abroad - think of race? Does "blackness" exist in Iran? And what can we learn about race and slavery in Iran from folklore, ethnography, literature, and films? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Amy Motlagh about her book Colorblind: Racial Th ...  Show more

Shakespeare himself didn't attend a university - and yet, for centuries, the world's greatest scholars have studied his works to learn about everything from poetry to politics. But have they missed the lessons that Shakespeare had for them in particular? In this episode, Jacke ta ...  Show more

This week, AE Stallings, the new Oxford professor of poetry, on the lives of poets; and Ann Kennedy Smith considers the different faces of Cornwall.'Sleeping on islands: A life in poetry', by Andrew Motion'The American poet laureate: A history of US poetry and the state', by Amy ...  Show more

Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard For the last seven episodes we've explored language, meaning, and their overlap with that thing we mean when we use language to say "poetry." In this episode we step back to some origins, including, at a meta-level, the origins of ...  Show more

Ruth Ozeki steps on into the Damn Library Hyperverse to shine. We talk about her latest opus, The Book of Form and Emptiness, and how books are magical, and accessing her teenage self, and an unexpected turn of narrative luck with snowglobes, along with many other thi ...

A published author has entered the O.R. and it’s our own Tanya Rad! We hear everything about her upcoming book and how a Scrubber helped it all come together.   We HAVE to break down “Midnights” by Taylor Swift, and now that Becca and Tanya have had a few days to digest the lyric ...  Show more