This Mama Is Lit!

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Heather Sweeney, author of Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage, about identity, divorce, and rebuilding after years as a military spouse.Camouflage: How I Emerged From the Shadows of a Military Marriage is about Heather Sweeney’s journey from being overshadowed by her husband’s military career to rediscovering her identity as a single mother. The memoir explores how military spouses often conform to a support role that is secondary to their spouse’s military career. Sweeney writes about how the hardships of military life contribute to her adaptability and resilience.Heather Sweeney is the author of the memoir Camouflage: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage. She writes about divorce, life as a military spouse, parenting, and women’s health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, Newsweek, Business Insider, Good Housekeeping, and Military.com. She lives in Virginia, and Camouflage is her first book.Order CamouflageWebsiteInstagramLinkedInSubstack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Tiffanie Drayton chat with Whitney French, author of Syncopation: A Novel in Verse, about memory, identity, and what it means to reshape yourself in a fractured world.In Syncopation: A Novel in Verse, in the aftermath of a Memory War, society is fragmented into new cultures, castes, and coalitions. Set against a backdrop of retrofitted food garages, microchip-sorting factories, and hyperloop terminals, this novel-in-verse emphasizes memory as the highest currency and love as dangerous, unruly, and singed with hope.The protagonists are O and Z, two young women searching for purpose in a world where a decades-long earthquake reverberates, and the population scrambles to hide from deadly acid rain. Descended from space pirates, O is drawn to the sky, while Z is earthbound, a skilled forager with connections to the black market. The two become travel companions and lovers, and are conflicted between choosing their values or each other.In this speculative novel, French offers readers an intricate future-world that resonates powerfully with our own, as it explores a people gripped in the war-torn politics of migration, memory-keeping, labor, and survival.Whitney French is a writer, educator, and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019) and Griot: Six Writers’ Sojourn into the Dark (Knopf Canada, 2022). Whitney is a Black futurist who explores memory, loss, technology, and nature in her work. She is a certified arts educator and an assistant professor in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She is also the co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, the only Black queer feminist press in Canada.Socials & LinksWebsiteInstagramHush HarborSyncopation: A Novel in Versehttps://linktr.ee/WhitneyFrenchWrites This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda and Sam chat with Lara Ehrlich, author of Bind Me Tighter Still, about domesticity and wildness in motherhood, the fierce love for our children, and feeling like we’re always falling short.In Bind Me Tighter Still, the youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto, is weary of an existence driven by hunger. She trades her tail for legs, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter—only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood. In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque called Sirenland and reinvents herself, performing as a siren in a tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She hires and trains human women to perform with her, and Sirenland becomes a national roadside attraction. Her daughter Naia performs as well, until she turns 15 and begins to resist the world her mother has created.Lara Ehrlich is the author of the story collection Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020) and the novel Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025). Lara is also the host of Writer Mother Monster, a podcast that has featured more than 100 conversations with writer–mothers navigating the tension between artistic ambition and caregiving. Her writing has been published in StoryQuarterly, Hunger Mountain Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Literary Hub, and others, and she is the writer in residence at Connecticut College. She is the founder and director of Thought Fox Writers Den and lives with her family in Connecticut.Socials and Links:www.LaraEhrlich.comwww.ThoughtFox.orghttps://www.facebook.com/lara.ehrlichhttps://www.instagram.com/lara.ehrlich/https://redhen.org/book/bind-me-tighter-still/Mentioned in the episode:Nobody’s GirlHans Christian AndersenDisney’s The Little Mermaid This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Chloe Yelena Miller, author of Perforated, about impossible wishes and material fears in parenting and poetry.In her second full-length poetry collection, Perforated, Miller’s poems span the grief of public and private losses. The poems are situated in both the US and Italy, ruminating on topics such as immigration, climate change, school shootings, and 9/11.Chloe Yelena Miller is a writer and teacher living in Washington, DC, with her partner and child. She’s the author of Perforated (2026) and Viable (2021), both published by Lily Poetry Review Books, and the poetry chapbook Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She co-founded and co-directs Brown Bag Lit, an online writing community. Miller teaches writing and literature through University of Maryland’s Global Campus, Politics and Prose bookstore, and New Directions in Writing. Miller has a Bachelor of Arts in Italian language and literature from Smith College (1998) and an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2003.)Socials and Links:SubstackInstagramBlueskyMilk Journal This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Rebecca Lehmann, author of The Beheading Game, about rewriting Anne Boleyn through the lens of motherhood, the punishment of powerful women, crafting a queer love story, and bringing poetry to the novel-writing process.Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer (which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College. The Beheading Game is her debut novel.In The Beheading Game, Anne Boleyn wakes up the day after her execution, sews her head back on, and seeks vengeance on Henry VIII.Author WebsiteRebecca InstagramCrown Publishing InstagramPreorder The Beheading Game This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Chloé Caldwell, author of Trying, about loneliness in infertility, contradictions with IVF in the queer community, and the rawness of writing in the moment. Over the years that Chloé had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.Chloé Caldwell is the author of the national bestselling novella, Women (recently reissued by Harper Perennial) and the books I’ll Tell You In Person, The Red Zone, and Legs Get Led Astray. Her latest book, the memoir Trying, is out now with Graywolf Press.Author WebsiteInstagramSubstackhttps://www.scrappyliterary.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Karen Palmer, author of She’s Under Here, about living with an undercurrent of fear and clawing her way out of abuse. In her memoir, Palmer examines why she ended up trapped, how she escaped, and how she handled the ongoing perils of life constructed around a false identity. She ruthlessly explores the lines between desire and fear, victim and perpetrator, and what it means to make difficult choices as a woman when none of the options are good.Karen Palmer is a Pushcart Prize winner, with grants from the NEA and the Colorado Council on the Arts. She’s Under Here grew out of her essay, “The Reader is the Protagonist,” first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and selected by Leslie Jamison for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2017.Author WebsiteInstagramFacebookBlueSky This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Dr. Robyn Kozlowitz, author of Post Traumatic Parenting, about using guilt as a teacher, discovering how stress and trauma affect parenting, and creating patterns of joy. Dr. Kozlowitz argues that the best time to rewire our trauma brain is when we are parenting. It gives us an opportunity to heal our inner child through admitting our own damage and not passing it onto our children. By recognizing our trauma, we take the shame away.Dr. Robyn Koslowitz is a clinical child psychologist and the author of the recently released book Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle, Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be. She’s a leading expert on the intersection of trauma and parenting, helping parents understand how both early life experiences and more recent events can shape—and sometimes sabotage—their ability to respond to their children with calm, clarity, and connection.Her core belief is simple but powerful: Parenting is a skill—and everyone can learn it. If you’re struggling, it’s not because you’re broken. It’s often because trauma has blocked your access to the parenting tools you need. And not only can you learn to parent skillfully after trauma—you can actually heal in the process.Through her book, podcast, YouTube channel, and the Post-Traumatic Parenting Summit, Dr. K offers practical tools, clinical insight, and deep compassion to help parents move from reactivity to intention.Author WebsiteInstagramYouTubePodcastLinkedIn This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Michelle Lerner, author of Ring, about defining and treating complicated grief, living with irreparable damage, and finding healing in nature. Ring takes the reader on an unforgettable odyssey through the depths of human emotion, from the hollows of grief to the heights of newfound hope. In the backdrop of a snow-covered sanctuary designed to aid the dying, Lee, a middle-aged non-binary person from the Midwest, grapples with the unbearable weight of losing their young adult daughter. Abandoning their previous life and even the comfort of a longtime spouse, Lee is driven by a quest for closure—or an end to it all.Michelle Lerner is the author of the novel Ring, published by Bancroft Press, the poetry chapbook Protection, published by Poetry Box and she has had personal essays in publications like Time and The Hill; She’s published poems and other writing in journals such as Shenandoah and VQR. She has an MFA in Poetry from The New School and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Michelle directs the Laura Boss Poetry Foundation and mentors young writers in Gaza through the organization We are Not Numbers. She’s a recovering public interest lawyer currently emerging from late-stage neurological Lyme Disease, living with her family in rural New Jersey.Author WebsiteInstagramBluesky This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Claire Adam, author of Love Forms, about forced delivery in Venezuela and testing the mother-child bond in fiction. Love Forms, longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, centers on Dawn, a 58 year old mother of two grown sons. She finds herself returning to her past and a secret she has kept for many years. When Dawn was 16, her parents sent her from Trinidad to Venezuela to have a baby and give her up for adoption. She’s now trying to track down the daughter she gave up, which leads her to retrace her journey from Trinidad to Venezuela to London, and question not only that fateful decision she made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.Claire Adam’s debut novel, Golden Child, was listed as one of the BBC’s “100 Novels That Shaped Our World” and was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. She was born and raised in Trinidad. She studied physics at Brown University and later received an MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in London.Author WebsiteInstagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Living Expenses, about technology creep in modern relationships, fertility treatments’ effect on emotional intimacy, and bookstore karaoke. Teri’s most recent novel interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships and also the discovery that so often it is when we are on the way to something else and stuck in the in-between period that we discover our true selves.Teri Vlassopoulos is the author of Living Expenses (Invisible Publishing, 2025), Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing, 2015) and Bats or Swallows (Invisible Publishing, 2010). Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in Room Magazine, Today’s Parent, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Toast, Open Book, and more. She has been nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and she sits on the Board of Directors of the FOLD (the Festival of Literary Diversity). Teri lives in Toronto.Author WebsiteInstagramSubstack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Brittany Micka-Foos, author of It’s No Fun Anymore, about domestic horror tropes and how a neurodiversity diagnosis offered insight into writing and motherhood. The lack of safety felt in womanhood and discomfort that lies within it is the discussion that Brittany strives to acknowledge and pursue. Her most recent book is a collection of eight short stories that explore the politics of victimization, the sites of trauma on women’s bodies, and women’s attempts to divine meaning from suffering.Brittany is the author of the poetry chapbook a litany of words as fragile as window glass (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, NonBinary Review, Hobart, Literary Mama, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. A former victim’s rights lawyer in Washington, DC, she turned to writing after the birth of her first child.Author WebsiteInstagramLiterary Mama Essay (2023) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda and Eva chat with Domenica Ruta, author of All the Mothers, about a new dialectic in motherhood, the specific anxieties of single moms, and the necessity of single mom communities. She also explores the trials of the family court system and the realities of what those minefields can mean for single moms.Domenica’s latest book, All the Mothers, is a novel that follows three single mothers in New York whose kids share the same deadbeat father. The protagonists Sandy, Stephanie, and Kaya eventually meet and begin to redefine family structure as single mothers. As they try to stay afloat financially while raising their children, and as these children grow and change, the father, Justin, creates numerous roadblocks and conflict along the way. Overall, this novel is real and funny, all while aptly narrating the intense struggles of single mothers, who are often judged for not maintaining the status quo.Domenica Ruta is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You and the novel The Last Day. She teaches in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The American Scholar, Oprah online, and many others.Author WebsiteInstagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Jessie Harrold, author of Mothershift, about matrescence - the process of becoming a mother, the four radical transformations, and the seven mother powers. Jessie explains how mothers can be agents of change, and how modern mothers in crisis can step into their innate powers to reclaim themselves.Mothershift is the first book of its kind to dive deeply into the science and soul of matrescence, the 2-3 year transition into motherhood. Mothershift helps mothers identify the cascade of changes they can expect as they enter motherhood, normalizes the feelings of grief and loss of self they may feel along the way, and reassures them that they are not broken, they are becoming. The book helps readers cultivate a sense of empowerment and leadership in motherhood, showing how mothering is a counterculture act. Mothershift is a Nautilus Gold Medal winner, has been featured in international media, and is being recognized as contributing to a pivotal development in our understanding of matrescence.Jessie Harrold is a coach and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for over fifteen years. She works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and nature-based experiences. Jessie is the author of Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage (Shambhala 2024) and Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead. She is also the host of The Becoming Podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes, and stewards the land.Author WebsiteInstagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Liz Alterman, author of Sad Sacked, about the perils and freedoms of unemployment, the dichotomy of working moms, and the need to write the book you want to read. Diving deep into her own family’s dual layoffs, Liz’s memoir uses humor as a healing force as she details the downsizing and uploading of life’s losses and wins.Liz Alterman is the author of the young adult thriller, He’ll Be Waiting, the suspense novels The Perfect Neighborhood, The House on Cold Creek Lane, and You Shouldn’t Have Done That, as well as the romcom Claire Casey’s Had Enough. Liz’s most recent literary thriller, A Different Type of Poison, was just released this week. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other outlets. Subscribe to her Substack where she shares the ups and downs of the writing life (and cat photos). Liz lives in New Jersey with her husband, three sons and two cats. She spends most days repeatedly microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms.Author WebsiteInstagramSubstack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Jessica Slice, author of Unfit Parent, about designing and inventing systems of parenting based on the bodies and minds we live in. Unfit Parent examines the obstacles that disabled parents face, the societal beliefs that undergird those barriers, and the political and economic systems that hold it all in place. Jessica explores how disability culture and the strengths inherent in having a body like hers would, if included in parenting culture, make contemporary parenting more sustainable.Jessica Slice is a disabled author, speaker, and essayist. Her book, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World (Beacon, 2025) has been shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. She is the co-author of Dateable: Swiping Right, Hooking Up, and Settling Down (Hachette, 2024) and This is How We Play (Dial, 2024), as well as the forthcoming This is How We Talk (Dial, 2025) and We Belong (Dial, 2026), which was co-authored with the late Judy Heumann. Jessica has been published in Modern Love, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Guardian, The Globe & Mail, LitHub, Alice Wong’s bestselling Disability Visibility, Slate, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and more. She’s been featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, PBS, NPR, The Cut, the BBC, and more. She lives in Toronto with her family.Author WebsiteInstagramSubstack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Natasha Williams, author of The Parts of Him I Kept, about parenting her father through schizophrenia and healing through memoir writing.The Parts of Him I Kept is an intimate account of a daughter’s coming of age in the face of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. The Parts of Him I Kept asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition.Natasha Williams has worked as an adjunct biology professor at SUNY Ulster in the Hudson Valley of New York and as a consultant for the International Public-School Network, coaching science teachers. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania. She attended the Bread Loaf School of English in the summer of 2020 and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2023. Excerpts of The Parts of Him I Kept, published in April 2025 from Apprentice House Press, have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Change Seven, LIT, Memoir Magazine, Onion River Review, Writers Read, Post Road, and South Dakota Review.Author WebsiteInstagramFacebook This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Abigail Leonard, author of Four Mothers, about parenting in four different countries, politicizing motherhood, and supporting mothers with the power of community.Utterly moving and propulsively readable from page one, Abigail interweaves stories of four mothers from four different countries with a critically researched exploration of how parental support programs evolved in each country—and why some provide more help than others. As nations around the world debate programs like paid leave, universal daycare, reproductive healthcare, and family tax incentives, Four Mothers offers a uniquely intimate, moving portrait of what those policies mean for parents on the ground—and considers what modern families really want.Abigail is an award-winning international reporter and news producer, previously based in Tokyo, where she was a frequent contributor to NPR, Time, and New York Times video. Her stories have also appeared in The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Vox. Before moving to Japan, she wrote and produced long-form news documentaries as a staff producer for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America. Stories she reported have earned a National Headliner Award, an Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and a James Beard Foundation Media Award Nomination. She was a 2011 East-West Center Japan Fellow and 2010 UN Foundation Journalism Fellow. She served as First Vice President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, a 2000-member national press organization, and also chaired its scholarship program.Author WebsiteInstagramFacebook This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Allison Buccola, author of The Ascent, about the anxieties of new motherhood, renegotiating relationships post-childbirth, and navigating career transitions.Allison’s most recent novel explores an unsolved mystery of a reclusive commune twenty years prior. The only known survivor, Lee, has tried to put the pain of her past behind her, building a new identity for herself. But motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. Then a stranger shows up on her doorstep, offering answers to all of Lee’s questions about her past. Can Lee keep her safe, stable life? Or will new revelations about “the cult that went missing” shatter everything? In The Ascent, Allison Buccola has crafted a nerve-rattling thriller about motherhood, identity, and the truths we think we know about our families.Allison Buccola is the author of The Ascent and Catch Her When She Falls. She has a JD from the University of Chicago and lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and their two young children.Author WebsiteInstagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Monique Clesca, author of Silence and Resistance: Memoir of a Girlhood in Haiti, about reckoning with family secrets, healing, and fighting for Haitian children’s rights.Monique Clesca is an activist, journalist, and advocate for children’s and women’s rights, participating in high-level policy issues in Haiti and Africa and offering holistic support to girls and women who have suffered domestic and sexual violence. For leading a movement to eliminate child marriage, Monique received the Commander in the Niger Order of Merit in 2016 from the President of Niger. In 2016, Monique also retired from the United Nations to work as an international consultant and continue her work as a leading voice on feminism, democracy, ,and social justice in Haiti. She has spoken at many universities and as a guest on Democracy Now, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, and Black News. She has been published in The New York Times, the Miami Herald, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and many others.Author websiteInstagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields, Brianna Avenia-Tapper, Holly Rizzuto Palker, and Eva Langston come together to reflect on the evolution of this podcast, memorable guests, and the conversations we can’t wait to have. From their very first attempts at recording to latest and greatest moments, they take time to reflect, celebrate and appreciate all the authors they have featured in addition to what they have learned from each other. The Literary Mama community is fierce and fabulous. Thank you to our loyal listeners who continue to show up for us. We have so much more to explore with you.Literary Mama believes that all mothers have a story worth sharing and honors the many faces of motherhood by publishing work that celebrates the journey as well as the job. We celebrate the physical, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual processes of becoming a mother through words and images that may be so stark it hurts. We welcome perspectives that challenge us to examine motherhood through a variety of lenses. We’re not afraid of publishing work that crosses boundaries of race, gender, age, or income and encourage comments that build community.To learn more, visit our About, Staff, Contributors, and Submissions pages.Sign up for our email newsletter to become a Literary Mama Insider!Sent just once a month, you’ll receive an email to let you know our new issue is live on the months we publish. On other months, you’ll receive a Between the Issues newsletter with editor picks, exclusive content, and more. A few times a year, we will send emails about fundraising or special events so you can join in the fun. Plus receive our 8 Tips for Mama Writers as a thank you!Jane FriedmanCatherine NewmanNicole HaroutunianTovah KleinMaggie SmithNancy ReddyK.T. NguyenRachelle BergsteinKathleen GlasgowAmy ShearnNicole CooleyMolly SpencerLena Khalaf TuffahaJessica Slice (releasing 11/20/2025)Tiffanie DraytonJudith SmithJessie Harrold (releasing 12/4/2025)Amy Bornman Kelly McMastersJacinda Townsend This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

For our 50th episode, Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Maggie Smith, author of Dear Writer, about applying poetic license to writing and beyond, embracing the beginner’s mind, and aging in reverse through creativity. Smith’s national bestseller guides the reader on how to unleash the creative mind with ten ingredients, each one explored through inspirational essays and writing prompts. It’s a book for artists of all genres and for everyday life.Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful; My Thoughts Have Wings, a picture book illustrated by SCBWI Portfolio grand prize winner Leanne Hatch; the national bestsellers Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change; as well as Good Bones, named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; and Lamp of the Body, winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award.A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received six Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and so many others. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, on the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere.Smith holds a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA from The Ohio State University. After working for several years in trade book and educational publishing, she now works as a freelance writer, editor, and educator. She has taught creative writing at Gettysburg College, Ohio Wesleyan University, in the MFA and undergraduate programs at The Ohio State University, for the Antioch University Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA, and as MFA faculty for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. She is also the host of The Slowdown, a poetry podcast from American Public Media, supported in part by the Poetry Foundation.Maggie Smith’s most recent title The People’s Project, an anthology co-curated with Saeed Jones (Washington Square Press/Atria) was released September 9, 2025. Her forthcoming book, A Suit or a Suitcase, a collection of poems (Washington Square Press/Atria) is coming March 24, 2026.Author WebsiteInstagramFacebookPodcastSubstack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston chat with Jessica Guerrieri, author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, about motherhood drinking culture, the power of family and friendship, and addiction. Jessica's debut novel offers an honest rebuttal to the prevalence of alcohol in "mom life" and the fragility of family ties.Originally from the Bay Area, Jessica Guerrieri lives in Davis, California, with her husband and three young daughters. Jessica has a background teaching special education but left the field to pursue a career in writing. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea won the Maurice Prize for Fiction from her alma mater, UC Davis. With over a decade of sobriety, Jessica is a fierce advocate for addiction recovery. Jessica's second novel, Both Can Be True, will be released in May 2026 and is available for preorder now.Author WebsiteInstagramThreadsTikTokSubstack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Catalina Margulis, author of Again, Only More Like You, about a reckoning of journalism, ideas of what a "good mother" is, and hard-kept female friendships. For fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Jennifer Weiner, Again, Only More Like You offers a poignant and humorous look at friendship and reinvention at 40.Catalina is an author, podcast host and mother of four who has written for many of Canada’s top publications over the past 20 years. Cat was an editor at ELLE Canada, Flare, and Today’s Parent, she was a regular contributor to Savvymom, Mabel’s Labels, and Walmart Canada, and has written for more than 40 publications, including The Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, and Yummy Mummy Club. She is also the host of Passion Project, a podcast about making your dreams happen. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she lives with her family in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada.Author website: https://catmargulis.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catmargulisFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/catmargulisYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpkg_U6XtfcbptMuCXd_p_gSpotify: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Penny Zang, author of Doll Parts, about writing through grief, the “rights and wrongs” of motherhood, and finding inspiration in Sylvia Plath. For readers of The Virgin Suicides and I Have Some Questions For You, Doll Parts is a dual timeline suspense novel following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life.Penny Zang is from Maryland and graduated with an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and South 85, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She lives in South Carolina, where she teaches English. Doll Parts (Sourcebooks Landmark) is her debut novel.Author website: https://www.pennyzang.com/Substack: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pennyzang/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PennyZangWriter/X: https://x.com/Penny_Zang This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Ellen Wiles about her second novel, The Unexpected, published in November 2024 by HarperCollins. It follows two best friends, Robin and Kessie, who find themselves platonically coparenting a baby. It's a book about different species of love, including friendship and kinship, about motherhood and fertility, and about unconventional and queer families.Ellen Wiles is a British novelist, sound artist, literary anthropologist, and Creative Writing professor at the University of Exeter, UK. She has previously worked as a barrister and as a musician. She is the author of two novels, The Unexpected (2024) and The Invisible Crowd (2017), and two non-fiction books, Live Literature (2021) and Saffron Shadows (2015). She also makes literary audio work engaging with nature and landscape, and is currently artist-in-residence at an environmental science center.Author website: https://www.ellenwiles.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellenwiles/#BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/ellenwiles.bsky.socialLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellen-wiles-a8478951/?originalSubdomain=uk This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Emma Pattee, author of Tilt, about parsing capitalism and creative pursuits, powering large-scale climate activism, and questioning how to love something you know will die.Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, and her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, Carve Magazine, and many more. Her debut novel, Tilt, was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2025.Author website: https://www.emmapattee.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmapattee/?hl=en This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Eva Langston talk with Jill Dopf Viles, the author of Manufacturing My Miracle: One Woman’s Journey To Acquire Her Personalized Gene Therapy. Jill writes about her experiences with Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy. These experiences are placed in the hands of a deft and lyrical writer who often surprises the reader with unforgettable images and memories even as she works through the story of diagnosis, acceptance, and further research. She persists in making her own connections about EDMD as she performs her own research, discovers others with this rare condition, communicates with medical researchers, and weighs the risks and benefits of matters such as personalized gene therapy.Since the age of 19, Jill Viles has sought answers for a rare genetic disease that has plagued her family for generations. She began her studies in her university library and genetics courses. But her most fruitful efforts involved an internship in a genetics lab with a medical doctor. Over the next 30 years, Jill self-diagnosed her family with Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy, a disease originally dismissed by her neurologist because it was thought that “girls don’t get that disease.”Author website: https://diyscientist.blog/Obituary: https://www.laufersweilerfuneralhome.com/obituaries/jill-vilesProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/remembering-jill-viles-diy-geneticist-muscular-dystrophy-david-espstein This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Kathleen Glasgow, author of The Glass Girl, about her distinct writing process, being a "sad book" author, and writing YA novels about addiction, grief and other tough topics.Kathleen Glasgow started as a poet and somehow found herself writing novels. She's the author of the New York Times and internationally bestselling YA novels Girl in Pieces, The Glass Girl,You'd Be Home Now, and How to Make Friends With the Dark, She's the coauthor, with Liz Lawson, of the bestselling mystery series, The Agathas and The Night in Question. Her books have been nominated for numerous school reading awards and have been featured in People Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and Vanity Fair. She has an MFA in Poetry from The University of Minnesota.Author website: https://www.kathleenglasgowbooks.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/misskathleenglasgow/Threads: https://www.threads.com/@misskathleenglasgow?hl=enFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/p/Kathleen-Glasgow-Author-100094105716522/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kathleenglasgow?lang=en This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Lish McBride, author of quirky books for teens and adults, about writing in different genres, navigating the publishing industry, and weaving humor through daily life.Lish McBride is a prolific writer of Young Adult and Adult books that often contain humor and magic. Her latest adult novel, The Suitcase Swap, is a love story born out of a JFK Airport baggage claim snafu. The book was first released in the United Kingdom and will be out in the U.S. soon. The audio version can be found here. Her latest YA novel, Most Likely to Murder, will release in March 2026 and is available now for preorder.In addition to being a professional writer, Lish exists as an amateur goblin living in the Pacific Northwest. In the crime of the century, she tricked not one but two universities into giving her degrees, ending up with an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Lish is a former bookseller and event host at Third Place Books, a giant thriving indie bookstore just outside of Seattle. Her first book, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults title, Morris Award finalist, and won the Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award. She is the author of other funny and creepy Young Adult books such as Necromancing the Stone, Firebug, Pyromantic, Curses, and Red in Tooth and Claw. She also has her adult fantasy romance series, which so far includes A Little Too Familiar and Rough Around the Hedges. Beyond writing, her ultimate dream is to have her own castle and one of those libraries with the wheely ladder.Author website: https://lishmcbride.squarespace.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lishmcbride/Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/lishmcbride.bsky.social This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Alicia Elliott's debut novel, And Then She Fell, explores how motherhood and mental health collide as an Indigenous young woman confronts her inherited trauma and looks to her own creation story to find her power.Alicia is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2018, Best Canadian Stories 2018, and The Journey Prize Stories 30, and she was chosen as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. Her debut novel, And Then She Fell, was A Globe and Mail "Best Book of 2023" as well as a Most Anticipated Book Pick by Good Morning America, Bustle, CrimeReads, Electric Literature, and more.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellialic/?hl=en This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Amanda K. Jaros, author of Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology, about mothering and stepmothering, running a motherhood magazine, and finding support in writing communities.Amanda is a writer and editor living in Ithaca, NY. Her writing passion began with personal journals and short stories as a child, which morphed into a series of mommy blogs after she had her son in the mid-aughts. Nearing forty, she decided to follow her dream and returned to school to earn her MFA in creative nonfiction from Chatham University (where Rachel Carson earned her degree in 1929!). In recent years, her writing has appeared in a wide range of places, online and in print, from literary magazines to the local newspaper.The opportunity to work at Literary Mama opened the door for more editing experience and she stayed there for 11 years. Amanda started as a blog editor, moved to the creative nonfiction department, and then became a senior editor while eventually serving as Editor-in-Chief from 2018-2022. During that time she incorporated the all-volunteer organization as a 501(c)3 nonprofit and led several successful fundraising campaigns. Find more of her work here. In 1999, Amanda thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail by herself. Her memoir In My Boots about the six-month adventure was published this year by Black Rose Writing.Since 2018, Amanda has served on her County Legislature, participating in many committees and boards, focusing on environmental, water resources, health and human services, and government operations issues. She loves trees, mountains, the Adirondacks, and everything in nature. When not writing or editing, you can find her on a trail somewhere.Author website: http://www.amandakjaros.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandajaroschampion/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Amanda-K-Jaros-Author/100089608878145/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-k-jaros-champion-082b6842/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langton and Amanda Fields chat with Nikkya Hargrove, author of Mama: A Queer Black Woman's Story of a Family Lost and Found, about raising her half sibling as her child and navigating the family court and prison systems.Nikkya Hargrove's powerful memoir Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found follows her journey as she makes the decision to raise her third half sibling, Jonathan, after he was born to her mother, who had a crack cocaine addiction and spent time incarcerated while Nikkya was raised by her grandparents. The book traces Nikkya’s path toward custody and adoption, her family’s perspective on her queerness, and the way she finds love and forms a family.Nikkya Hargrove is a 2012 LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow and has written about adoption, same-sex multi-ethnic marriage, motherhood as a gay woman, and the prison system for The Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, Scary Mommy, and Shondaland, among many others. She has worked for social impact nonprofits providing support to underserved communities throughout her professional career. She graduated from Bard College and lives in Connecticut with her wife and three children.Author website: https://www.nikkyamhargrove.com/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/nikkyahargrove/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston, Holly Rizzuto Palker + Amanda Fields chat with Sandra Chwialkowska, author of The Ends of Things, about screenwriting versus novel-writing + surviving a book launch with a newborn baby.Sandra Chwialkowska is a television producer and writer whose first novel, The Ends of Things, is a psychological suspense that explores female friendship and agency, and pushes back against the trope of the helpless female as a “perfect victim.” Her prolific years of screenwriting translate into engrossing cinematic writing on the page, and this novel grew out of her own fears of traveling alone as a woman.Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, starring Hilary Swank. She has also developed several TV adaptations for female-centric thrillers, including Mary Kubica’s New York Times Bestseller Local Woman Missing. Sandra holds a BA in literature from Yale. Author website: https://sandra-c.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandrachw/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-chwialkowska-75603a8/IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2181319/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker speak with Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, about adoption, the complexities of meeting one's birth mother, and reproductive freedom. Seeking her birth mother and fighting for reproductive rights inspires Susan to find the power of support in community and answers through her writing.A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award and a Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story. Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family.Susan Ito began reading at the age of three, and writing stories at the age six. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen,The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell colony Fellow, and has also been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. She was one of the co-organizers of Rooted and Written, a no-fee writing workshop for writers of color. She lives in Northern California.Author Website: https://www.thesusanito.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susanitowriterInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesusanito/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston speak with Judith Smith, author of Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children Through Conflict and Change, about mothering challenging adult children, and how to find solutions through acceptance and no assignment of fault. Becoming an adult is not nearly as clear today as it was 50 years ago. Major structural changes are needed for mothers not to blame themselves and begin to discover answers on how to move forward.Difficult is based on a series of in-depth interviews Judith Smith conducted with women (all over 60 years of age, across socio-economic and geographic locations). Despite the unique circumstances of the women’s lives, she discovered many commonalities in their stories. Nearly all had re-opened their homes to their adult children when they had nowhere else to go. Many of the adult children had mental health problems or substance abuse disorder—or both. None of the women had expected their own later years to be framed by being once again “parent.” Yet for all the many similarities, there were also unique circumstances in each child’s life. That’s what led Smith to search for a name to describe what she was seeing and to ultimately settle on the term Difficult Adult Child. She chose this name to acknowledge not just the challenges faced by the grown children, but the hardships passed along to the mothers who cared for them.Judith is a licensed clinical social worker who offers individual counseling, webinars, and weekly support groups for mothers with "difficult adult children." After years as a researcher on child development, Judith began researching an understudied aspect of the life cycle -- mothering in later life. Her work focuses on the unique stresses that mothers experience when their adult children are struggling with serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or chronic unemployment and incarceration.She has been interviewed in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and on many podcasts including Schizophrenia: Three Moms in the Trenches.Author Website: https://www.difficultmothering.com/LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/judith-r-smith-99a81134/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/difficultmothering/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Eva Langston chat with Rachelle Bergstein, author of The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, about why Blume, once the most banned writer in the United States is more relevant now than ever. Judy Blume's ability to reflect real life parenting, puberty and precocious kids built a trust with her adolescent readers and provided a solid training ground for the next generation of women's rights activists. The original Judy Blume generation has now grown up and taken her messaging into our own parenting and beyond.Rachelle is a lifestyle writer, bestselling author and editor, focused on style, pop culture and families. Her latest book, The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood For All of Us published with Simon & Schuster in July 2024 and it was a USA Today bestseller, as well as a notable nonfiction pick by LibraryReads. Bookpage called it “ground-breaking,” the LA Times called it “lively and important,” and it has been positively reviewed by Kirkus, The Wall Street Journal and The Skimm.Rachelle's first book, Women from the Ankle Down: The Story of Shoes and How They Define Us (HarperCollins, 2012) was called “wickedly provocative” by Kirkus, “fleet-footed” by the New York Times, and was named one of Janet Maslin’s top beach reads of Summer 2012. Her second, Brilliance and Fire: A Biography of Diamonds (HarperCollins, 2016) was called “exhilarating” by the Wall Street Journal, and was picked as one of Amazon’s top nonfiction titles of June 2016. It was featured in best-of summer lists at Harper’s Bazaar and The Knot.Rachelle spent five years as a features editor and reporter for the New York Post. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg View, Forbes, Wirecutter, LitHub and others. She has been interviewed for 99% Invisible, NPR’s Weekend Edition and Marketplace and has appeared on WSJ Lunch Break, Bold TV and Yahoo Finance. Inspired by Judy Blume’s longtime fight against book bans, Rachelle follows the current politically charged book banning crisis on her Substack, called Banner Year. She lives with her husband and son in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.Author Website: https://www.rachellebergstein.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachellewb/?hl=enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelle-bergstein/X: https://x.com/RaBergstein This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Brianna Avenia-Tapper chat with Aileen Weitraub, author of Knocked Down: A High Risk Memoir, about the sacrifice of motherhood, interfaith marriage, and the gifts of grief. Grieving the loss of her father while on bedrest has Aileen poking at the notion of how the boy becomes a man when he loses a father. But what about the girl? What does she become?Aileen Weintraub is an award-winning author, journalist, and editor whose latest book is Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir, about a Brooklyn girl who moves to the country, gets married, and finds herself living in a rickety farmhouse, knocked up, and faced with the prospect of five months of bed rest. What ensues is a laugh-out-loud, emotionally charged story of one woman’s unexpected path to authenticity. The Erma Bombeck Workshop named Aileen Humor Writer of the Month for Knocked Down and Publishers Weekly says, “…there’s beauty on every page.”Aileen is also the author of the middle-grade social justice book WE GOT GAME! 35 Female Athletes Who Changed the World, which was honored as A Mighty Girl’s Best Book of the Year. Her best-selling Never Too Young: 50 Unstoppable Kids Who Made a Difference won a Parents’ Choice Award. She has been invited to write about women’s health and wellness for multiple anthologies including PLAY IT FORWARD and SO HEAVY A WEIGHT both forthcoming in Spring 2025.Her essays and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, HuffPost, NBC, AARP, Glamour, and other publications. Her essay “This Is What No One Tells Women About What Happens to Your Body in Your 40s,” in HuffPost garnered over 2 million hits and was discussed on The View.Inspired by the athletes in WE GOT GAME! Aileen has taken up boxing. She pronounces her name with a long A, like the first letter of the alphabet.Author Website: https://www.aileenweintraub.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aileenweintraub/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AileenWeintraub.Author/X: https://x.com/AileenWeintraub This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Holly Rizzuto Palker and Amanda Fields chat with Nancy Johnson, author of People of Means, about ancestral pride, Black excellence and social reckoning in each and every moment in time. They explore the notion of how nothing has changed, yet so much has in a short period of time. Ultimately, Nancy writes to open the dialogue on race and welcome complicated conversations about the racial divide in our country.A native of Chicago’s South Side, Nancy Johnson worked for more than a decade as an Emmy-nominated, award-winning television journalist at CBS and ABC affiliates in markets nationwide. Her debut novel, The Kindest Lie, has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and is featured on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and has been named one of the most anticipated books of 2021 by Newsweek, O, the Oprah Magazine, Shondaland, NBC News, Marie Claire, ELLE, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, Good Housekeeping, Parade, Refinery29, and more. Booksellers nationwide selected her novel as an Indie Next pick and librarians chose it for LibraryReads. Nancy’s work has been published in Real Simple and O, The Oprah Magazine, and has received support from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Tin House, and Kimbilio Fiction.A graduate of Northwestern University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nancy lives in downtown Chicago and leads corporate and internal communications for a large health care nonprofit.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancyjauthor/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyJohnsonAuthor/Author Website: https://nancyjohnson.net/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Sarah Sawyer, author of The Undercurrent, about power in girlhood, mystical physicality in motherhood and secrets unravelled. Sarah also leaves us with a wise warning from her own mother: beware of life events that involve women throwing parties.Sarah Sawyer's debut novel was touted by Gillian Flynn as "A mystery of remarkable scope, bristling with intelligence, beauty, and humanity. It is, quite simply: stunning." The Undercurrent (Zibby Books 2024) tells the story of an overwhelmed new mother who becomes obsessed with the unsolved disappearance of a young girl from her small Texas hometown―and unearths her own family’s dark secret. Told in multiple perspectives with two different timelines, it is a gripping portrait of motherhood, obsession, broken family bonds, and buried secrets.A graduate of Amherst College and the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, Sawyer teaches English at a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and two children.Author Website: https://www.sarahsawyerauthor.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahsawyerauthor/# This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a poet, essayist, and translator, works tirelessly to break down language and thoughtfully craft it to match the human condition. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award, Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Revie, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books). She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. In 2024 she curated a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore.Lena spent ten years working with journalists and editors as a volunteer for Seattle's Arab American community organizations. She helped to tell the stories of people living between two homelands, people who speak in translation and navigate the realities of long wars. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop. Lena was born in Seattle, Washington but she was raised in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. She has lived the experiences of first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate. Her heritage is Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian and she is fluent in Arabic and English. She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic and political borders, borders between languages, between the present and the living past.Lena is passionate about a Free Palestine, the perfect cup of coffee, poetry, language, and gardening. She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington.* Author Website: https://www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com/* Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lenatuffaha/* Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lena.khalaf.tuffaha This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Ava Chin is the author of Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (Penguin Press, 2023) where she shatters the silence that The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 imposed on the disenfranchised Chinese immigrant community. Her extensive research paired with her rich library of oral histories passed down through familial generations were woven together to create an American Library Association Notable Book and a Best Book of the year by TIME, the San Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Elle. She also wrote the award-winning Eating Wildly (Simon & Schuster, 2014), which won the 2015 M.F.K. Fisher Book Award for excellence in food writing. It's no wonder The Huffington Post named her one of "9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading."Chin's writing has appeared in The New York Times (“Urban Forager”), the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Marie Claire, and Saveur, among many others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), New York Institute for the Humanities, Asian American Writers’ Workshop and MacDowell. And as a former slam poet, she has performed on stages at Woodstock ‘94, the Whitney Museum, and the Knitting Factory.Professor Chin holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, a MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from Queens College, CUNY. She is Professor of Creative Nonfiction and Journalism at the CUNY Graduate Center where she is the head of the American Studies Certificate Program and she teaches nonfiction writing at the College of Staten Island. Chin lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.Author Website: https://avachin.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ava_chin/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ava-chin-45206b5/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Ava-Chin-Author-100065441441480/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana - the tragedies of Katrina and the climate crisis run deep for her and pour onto her pages. Her most recent book is a collection of poetry Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, July 2024) that explores the aftermath of sudden death and the feelings of loss we collectively experience with the endless ecological catastrophes. A prolific poet, Nicole is the author of seven books including Girl after Girl after Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018).Her awards include The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, a Creative Artists fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Cooley’s obsession with all things tiny has led to her latest project - a non-fiction book project, Dollhouse: A Book of Miniature Histories, excerpts of which have appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, and the Feminist Wire.Cooley is professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation and the English Department at Queens College-City University of New York and lives outside New York City with her family.Author website: http://nicolecooley.com/index.htmlFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicole.cooley.965 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Molly Spencer is an award-winning poet, critic, editor, and writing instructor at University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Her debut collection, If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge (SIU Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Invitatory (2024, Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press), her third collection, won the 2022 New Measure Poetry Prize.Molly’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, The Georgia Review among so many others. Her critical writing and essays have appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review online, Literary Hub, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.Author website: http://www.mollyspencer.com/Instagram: @mollypoetFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/molly.spencerX: https://x.com/mspencerpoetBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mspencerpoet.bsky.social This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Nancy Reddy, author of The Good Mother Myth, about how flawed social science presumptions have blurred our visions of motherhood and trusting our intuition.Author Website: https://www.nancyreddy.com/Substack: https://nancyreddy.substack.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nancy.o.reddy/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.reddy.1Preorder The Good Mother Myth: https://read.macmillan.com/promo/smpthegoodmothermyth/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

Anointed the “Toddler Whisperer” by Good Morning America, Dr. Tovah Klein is consistently tapped for her expertise in childhood development by New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Motherly, CNN, Today, and Slate, among many others. Her most recent book Raising Resilience has been hailed by Amy Schumer and is a USA Today bestseller.  As the Director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development and a psychology professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, Klein is an advisor to programs for children worldwide to children’s media including National Geographic and Apple TV+.Dr. Klein resides in New York City with her family and is the mother of three adult sons. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tovahklein/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/howtoddlersthrive/Buy Raising Resilience:  https://bookshop.org/p/books/raising-resilience-how-to-help-our-children-thrive-in-times-of-uncertainty-tovah-klein/21201420?ean=9780063286566 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

K.T. Nguyen’s 2024 debut psychological thriller You Know What You Did has received praise from People Magazine, CrimeReads, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Book Riot, Parade, Elle Magazine, The Seattle Times, and The Telegraph. A former Glamour magazine editor, she’s lived in New York City, San Francisco, and Taipei and has now settled just outside Washington, D.C. with her family where she enjoys native plant gardening, playing with her rescue terrier Alice, and rooting for the Mets. K.T. is a proud member of Crime Writers of Color, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. Author website: https://www.ktnguyenauthor.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ktnguyen_author/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/k.t.nguyen.books/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ktnguyen_authorBuy You Know What You Did: https://bookshop.org/p/books/you-know-what-you-did-k-t-nguyen/20435898?ean=9780593473856 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

To find out more about Kate and her work, visit her website at https://www.katefeiffer.comYou can also follow her on Facebook @Kate FeifferInstagram @KFeifferTikTok @katefeiffer This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

For more information about Ona, please go to her author website at  https://www.onagritz.com/More details regarding her awards is given here: https://www.onagritz.com/praise-awardsHer books include:Everywhere I Look https://bookshop.org/p/books/everywhere-i-look-ona-gritz/20981700The Space You Left Behind https://www.west44books.com/inc/_s24_The_Space_You_Left_Behind.phpTake a Sad Song https://www.west44books.com/inc/_f24/TakeaSadSong.php This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com

To find out more about Carley, please visit her website: https://www.carleymoore.com/Heart Less, her new collection of poetry is available from https://www.indolentbooks.com/heart-less/The Not Wives is available from https://www.feministpress.org/books-n-z/the-not-wivesPanpocalypse is available from https://www.feministpress.org/books-n-z/panpocalypse This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit literarymama.substack.com