Story Behind the Story

Zaina Arafat grew up in two very different worlds with different sets of expectations. It left her with a profound sense of alienation and the feeling of being caught between two identities. As a que…

Kawai Strong Washburn grew up on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Life on the Hāmākua coast gave him an appreciation for the natural landscape, as well as the stories and myths he learned in school and fro…

Born and raised in Markham, Ontario, Jillian Christmas is a poet, enthusiastic organizer, and activist in the Canadian arts community with a focus on increasing anti-oppression initiatives in spoken …

Environmental lawyer Rishi Reddi came to prominence as a writer in the early 2000s. Her short fiction has earned her a PEN Award as well as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and her story "Justice…

Alka Joshi had a complicated relationship to her Indian heritage as a young girl. After immigrating from Rajasthan to the American midwest when she was 9, she was frequently bullied because of her ra…

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the sparklingly surreal short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the National Book Cri…

Daniel Summerhill is a poet, a professor of Poetry and Social Action and Composition Studies at CSU Monterey Bay, and an Oakland native. He has performed his poetry on stages around the world, includ…

In this episode, I talk to comic writer Lilah Sturges about her work on Lumberjanes: The Shape of Friendship. Lumberjanes is a youth-oriented series that follows the adventures of a group of girls at…

In What is real?, Adam Becker details the century-long fight over the interpretation of quantum physics -- what this enormously successful theory, which has given us so much of the technology we use …

In her 2017 chapbook, Bitches of the Drought, poet and former Santa Cruz resident Lauren Eggert-Crowe explores what it's like when a woman's anger comes to the surface years after the object of her a…

When Andy Couturier was in his 20s, he and his wife Cynthia traveled to Japan to teach English and raise money to buy their own home. While there, he became friends with a group of people who organiz…

Drawing inspiration for documentary theater practitioners like Anna Deveare Smith and Culture Clash, Luis 'xago' Juarez interviewed nearly 40 residents of East Salinas before writing reAlisal: Storie…

THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT is the latest novel from Bay Area author giant Charlie Jane Anders. This critically acclaimed novel has led some to label Anders the successor to the queen of scie…

The Disasters is M.K. England's debut young adult novel about a group of space academy washouts who are forced to step up and save the world after escaping a terrorist attack. It's a wildly entertain…

Katya Apekina's debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, tells the story of Edie and Mae, two sisters who go to live with their estranged father in New York after their mother’s suicide…

When Carly Gelsinger was thirteen, she joined Pine Canyon Assemblies of God, a radical evangelical church in rural Monterey County. For years, she was “on fire for God,” speaking in tongues, slaying …