Podcast

Annalee Newitz on A Wall Is Also a Road + Automatic Noodle

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Who should science serve? 


On Writer’s Voice, I talk with Annalee Newitz about A Wall Is Also a Road,
 a science fiction novel about an alien graduate student who comes to Earth looking for evidence of life. A relationship with a woman in Pompeii forces them to ask what a researcher owes the people they study. We talk about care and consent, who funds science, and who benefits from it. 

“And I think that’s increasingly something that people are asking in academia is how do we bring care into education?” — Annalee Newitz

Then we turn to Automatic Noodle, a novella about four robots who open a noodle shop in a newly independent California. What can an alien scientist and a crew of noodle makers teach us about belonging?

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Annalee Newitz, THE TERRAFORMERS, Annalee Newitz, SCATTER, ADAPT AND REMEMBER

Tags: Annalee Newitz interview, A Wall Is Also a Road, Automatic Noodle, Writer’s Voice podcast, Francesca Rheannon, speculative fiction, science fiction, research ethics, robot rights,

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Podcast

Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys | Howard Mansfield, Invisible Monuments

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.


What happens when the person you love doesn’t exist?

This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with Carlos Barragán about The Yahoo Boys, his investigation into Nigeria’s romance scammers, which began with his own mother’s experience.

“Sometimes behind a perpetrator is another victim.” – Carlos Barragán

Then,  Howard Mansfield joins us to discuss Invisible Monuments, exploring why some memorials move us, why others don’t, and how we remember the past.

“It’s a back and forth between the monument and the person who’s visiting.” – Howard Mansfield

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Howard Mansfield, THE HABIT OF TURNING THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN & more, Howard Mansfield, CHASING EDEN

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Podcast

Ray Nayler on Palaces of the Crow

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What survives when a community is destroyed?

We talk with Ray Nayler about his new novel, Palaces of the Crow, in which four young people survive World War II in a Lithuanian forest with help from extraordinarily intelligent crows.

We explore how his years in Central Asia and the Balkans shaped the book, and why he turned to the Eastern Front to examine questions that still confront us.

What happens when trauma becomes revenge? How do we preserve a community’s memory? And what kinds of intelligence do we miss in other animals?

“I was trying to capture this memory of care…and also how much memory is under threat.” – Ray Nayler

Nayler describes care as something passed between generations, across communities, and even across species. Our conversation explores how relationships, stories, and the examples of others can help us interrupt cycles of harm.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Jacob Mikanowski, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE, Ray Nayler, THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA

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Podcast

Against Tech Oligarchy: Clarissa Redwine, JS Tan & Noam Scheiber on Worker Power

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What happens when tech workers challenge the companies they once believed in?

This week Writer’s Voice talks with Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan about Against Tech Oligarchy. They helped build the tech worker movement, and they’re candid about both its victories and the limits of its organizing strategies. We talk about Google’s Project Maven, the Kickstarter union drive, and why winning union recognition doesn’t automatically give workers the leverage they need.

“The only way to hold our bosses and our companies and institutions accountable is by having pressure from below.” — Clarissa Redwine

Then I revisit my conversation with Noam Scheiber about Hollywood writers, AI and the growing solidarity among college-educated workers. He also recommends Redwine and Tan’s book.

“Their book is called Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry. And I learned a lot from reading a galley of that book and I’ve learned a lot from the work over the years.” — Noam Scheiber

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Noam Scheiber on the Mutiny of the New Working Class, Maria Adelmann on Adjunct Labor

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Podcast

Tom Lin, Babylon, South Dakota + Omar El Akkad on Gaza

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What do we learn to live with, and when do we decide we can’t accept it anymore?

This week, we talk with Tom Lin about his novel, Babylon, South Dakota. It follows a Chinese immigrant family whose new home shares its landscape with a nuclear missile silo. We talk about magical realism, family stories, belonging, dementia, and the relationship between science fiction and the weapons people build.

I think the power of magical realism is to introduce amazing things which are treated as totally ordinary, which I hope encourages people to think, ‘what about my life that I actually do live is amazing and magical and lucky that I’ve gotten used to?’ — Tom Lin

Then, on the third anniversary of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, we revisit our March 2025 conversation with Omar El Akkad about One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. In this selected excerpt, we discuss the genocide in Gaza, Western complicity, and his argument that people will eventually claim they always opposed an atrocity they tolerated while it was happening.

Our conversation explores language that sanitizes violence, restrictions on dissent, and the failures of mainstream liberalism. El Akkad also explains why genocide became an absolute moral boundary for him.

It just seemed to me a particularly self-evident thing that when it’s too late to do anything about any of this, it’ll just be acceptable…to talk about how you’ve always been against it. — Omar El Akkad

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: U.S. Media’s Gaza Failure with Robin Andersen, Daniel Ellsberg, THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE

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Podcast

Malavika Kannan on Unprecedented Times and Lauren Acampora on The Animal Room

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What happens when the old rules stop working?

This week, two works of fiction look at the relationships that shape us, and the systems of power we often carry within ourselves.

First, Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her coming-of-age novel about Rishi, a queer Indian American student whose arrival at Stanford coincides with a crisis of faith in activism, institutions and the American promise itself.

As 2020 transforms the world around her, Rishi wrestles with family expectations, friendship, sex, consent, political disillusionment and her desire to become a writer. Kannan talks about Gen Z’s growing refusal to follow rules that no longer seem to deliver what they promise.

“One of the main themes that I was trying to explore in this book and that I think about a lot as a person is the question of agency.” — Malavika Kannan

Then Lauren Acampora talks about The Animal Room, her connected collection of stories about the many ways human beings love, use, protect, fear and exploit animals.

But these stories are also mirrors. They ask us to look at ourselves, and at what care, empathy and responsibility mean in our relationships with other people.

“The dominance isn’t working out so well.” — Lauren Acampora

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Short Stories by George Saunders & Jennifer Haigh, Vauhini Vara, THIS IS SALVAGED

Tags: Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times, Lauren Acampora, The Animal Room, Writer’s Voice, Gen Z fiction, queer fiction, Indian American fiction, coming of age novel, human animal relationships, Francesca Rheannon

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Podcast

Breaking ICE: Sonali Kolhatkar on Community Defense, Immigration and Democracy

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

When the state comes for your neighbors, what can you do?

In Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, journalist Sonali Kolhatkar looks at communities that aren’t waiting for someone else to answer that question.

“Nobody is coming to save us from this machinery. We have to do it ourselves.” — Sonali Kolhatkar

Kolhatkar tells us about ordinary people who have organized patrols to document ICE operations, created rapid-response networks, warned vulnerable neighbors and provided food, rent money, childcare and transportation to families affected by detention and deportation.

We also talk about why she connects immigrant rights with labor rights and Black struggles against policing and state violence, and why she believes mutual aid can build political solidarity across unexpected divides.

Finally, we discuss electoral politics. Kolhatkar argues that movements shouldn’t organize themselves around politicians. Instead, elected officials should be treated as public servants accountable to organized communities.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Lauren Markham, The Far Away Brothers, ILLEGALIZED: Rafael Martinez on Undocumented Youth Movements

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Podcast

James Baldwin & Keith Haring: Love, Art, Race and the Courage to Tell the Truth

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

SCAM ALERT: Someone is impersonating Francesca Rheannon and Writer’s Voice using thewritersvoicepodcast@gmail.com to solicit authors for fraudulent interviews and request payment. Writer’s Voice never charges authors or publishers for interviews. [Read the full scam alert.]

James Baldwin believed that love could be terrifying, but also our only hope. For Keith Haring, hope lay in art.

This week, I talk with Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin told through four relationships that shaped Baldwin’s life and art. Boggs describes love as central not only to Baldwin’s novels but to his political writing, and traces his journey from a difficult Harlem childhood and the Black church to his role as a writer, messenger and witness.

All of Baldwin’s work was about love. All of his novels were love stories… And his nonfiction writings, political writings, were also about love.” — Nicholas Boggs

Then, I revisit part of my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Haring challenged the boundary between high and popular art, from his subway drawings to the Pop Shop. Gooch talks about Haring’s collaborations, his determination to communicate across class and cultural lines, and the legacy of his belief in “art for everybody.”

“Keith did everything that he could do to blow that system [the art market] apart.” — Brad Gooch

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: DaMaris Hill, A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING, Ta-Nahisi Coates, THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE

Tags: Black history, James Baldwin, queer artists, Keith Haring, Brad Gooch, Nicholas Bogss, queer writers, Writer’s Voice

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Podcast

James Crawford on THE VANISHING EARTH + Max Page on New York and 9/11

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Extraction Built Our World. Now Comes the Reckoning.

What do we do when the systems that created modern prosperity begin to undermine the conditions for life itself?

I talk with James Crawford about The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. Crawford grew up in a family shaped by coal, copper and North Sea oil. Now he’s asking what that history means in a world where extraction reaches into virtually everything we do.

We talk about lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the limits of a purely technological green transition, the rights of nature, climate litigation and the poisoned landscape of Butte, Montana, where environmental repair will have to continue indefinitely.

“The repair isn’t about returning us to what we were, it’s about facing what we are now.” — James Crawford

Then, to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we return to my 2009 interview with Max Page about The City’s End. Page traces two centuries of imagined catastrophes in New York, from political and economic collapse to nuclear annihilation and climate disaster.

His surprising argument is that destroying New York in our imagination isn’t only an expression of fear. It can also reveal how deeply we value the city and what we fear losing.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Richard Heinberg, SNAKE OIL & Bill McKibben, OIL AND HONEY, Hope For The Climate Crisis: Michael Mann, OUR FRAGILE MOMENT

Tags: extraction, economic growth, rights of nature, public trust doctrine, James Crawford, The Vanishing Earth, green energy, lithium, 9/11, New York City, World Trade Center, Max Page, The City’s End

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Podcast

Caring for Aging Parents: Money, Love and Hard Choices

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

There comes a moment in many families when the people who once took care of us begin to need our care.

This week on Writer’s Voice, two writers explore that profound reversal, and the practical, emotional and even spiritual challenges it brings.

First, personal finance journalist Beth Pinsker talks about My Mother’s Money. When her fiercely independent mother became ill, Pinsker suddenly found herself managing everything from bank accounts and bills to the staggering costs of long-term care. And despite decades of expertise in personal finance, she discovered just how unprepared most of us are.

“We make it so hard for everybody. Oh, my gosh, it is just a morass of red tape out there.” — Beth Pinsker

Then, an interview from our archives: novelist L. Annette Binder talks about Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, her memoir of caring for her mother through Alzheimer’s disease. Binder writes about grief and memory, but also about something unexpected, the moments of love, presence and even grace she found as her mother’s world grew smaller.

“The love that my mom was capable of feeling and that I felt for her survived her cognitive decline.” L. Annette Binder

Two daughters, two different journeys, and one question many of us will face. How do we care for the people who once cared for us?

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: L. Annette Binder on Child of Earth & Starry Heaven, Caring for Elders: Susan Jacoby, NEVER SAY DIE & Allan Teel: ALONE & INVISIBLE NO MORE

Tags: caring for aging parents, elder care, Beth Pinsker, My Mother’s Money, L. Annette Binder, Child of Earth and Starry Heaven, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, financial caregiving, long-term care, Medicare, memory care, aging parents, Writer’s Voice, podcast,

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Podcast

Joseph Kelly on The Biggest Lie and America’s Fascist Roots

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

American fascism didn’t begin with Donald Trump, or even with the rise of fascism in Europe. Its roots reach deep into our own history.

America’s road to fascism began with a big lie about who counts as fully human. That’s what historian Joseph Kelly reveals in his book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Kelly traces a long struggle between two visions of the country. One rests on the Declaration’s promise of equality. The other claims that people aren’t equal, that white people are superior to Black people and therefore have the right to dominate them.

We follow that ideology from the Missouri crisis through pseudoscientific racism, Indian removal, slavery and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. Kelly explains how the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, Jim Crow and The Birth of a Nation used fear, myth and racialized sexual panic to defend white rule.

We also look at a road not taken, multiracial democracy and class-based political cooperation. Those possibilities were repeatedly attacked by elites who weaponized fears of replacement and Black political power.

Kelly connects domestic white supremacy to American empire in Cuba and the Philippines. He argues that fascism is a corruption of democracy, built when dissent is silenced, violence is celebrated and allegiance to the tribe and its leader replaces truth. That history, he says, can help us understand the battle over democracy today.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Aran Shetterly on The Greensboro Massacre, Paul Kix on the fight to end Jim Crow

Tags: Joseph Kelly, The Biggest Lie, American fascism, white supremacy, racism, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, replacement theory, multiracial democracy

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Podcast

Victoria Hetherington + Silvia Park on Human-AI Relationships

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

A machine that never judges us may also teach us to forget how human relationships work.

Writer’s Voice talks with Victoria Hetherington about The Friend Machine, her investigation into people who seek friendship, therapy and love from AI. We explore loneliness, simulated care, privacy, emotional dependence and the extraordinary power of the corporations building these systems.

“That’s probably my primary concern, that moral de-skilling might occur.” — Victoria Hetherington

Then, we revisit our 2025 conversation with Silvia Park about her sci-fi novel Luminous. Set in a reunified future Korea, the novel follows a family whose estranged siblings include two humans and a robot.

“What I really question is, if robots exist in this world, would they serve as an outlet or would they amplify our dark urges?” — Silvia Park

Together, these books grapple with salient questions arising from AI and monopoly corporate power. Can programmed affection become love? And what does how we treat A.I. entities say about ourselves?

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Bruce Holsinger on AI’s Moral Dilemmas, Ray Nayler on AI and Autocracy

Tags: Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine, Silvia Park, Luminous, AI companions, artificial intelligence, AI friendship, AI therapy, sentient robots, AI ethics, AI privacy, Writer’s Voice

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Podcast

Ida Susser on the Yellow Vests, Abdul El-Sayed on Medicare for All

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What does it take to win back a democracy, and who is our government really supposed to serve?

This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with anthropologist Ida Susser about her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. She tells the story of a movement in France that began with anger over a diesel tax and grew into a much deeper defense of public services, economic dignity, and democratic power.

“There is no other thing to do for democracy, but fight for your rights every single way and day that you can.” – Ida Susser


Then, following Abdul El Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, we return to my 2021 conversation with him about the book he co-wrote, Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide. El-Sayed explains why American healthcare costs so much, how private insurance drives those costs higher, and how Medicare for All could cover everyone while giving the public real power over prices.

“Under Medicare for All, we would pay for the system far more progressively to cover everyone.” – Dr. Abdul El Sayed

Two movements, one fundamental question, can ordinary people reclaim the institutions meant to serve them?

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You may also like: Abdul El Sayed & Micah Johnson, MEDICARE FOR ALL: A Citizen’s Guide, Remembering The Revolutions of 2011

Tags: Ida Susser, Abdul El-Sayed, Yellow Vests, Medicare for All, Michigan Senate primary, democracy, healthcare reform, single-payer healthcare, neoliberalism, social movements, corporate power, Writer’s Voice

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Podcast

Can Sci-Fi Save Us? John Feffer on SONGLANDS and Portia Elan on HOMEBOUND

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Can science fiction help us imagine a way through climate crisis, runaway corporate power, and the rise of AI?

This week, we talk with John Feffer about Songlands and Portia Elan about Homebound, two speculative novels that ask how we can make a livable future in an age of crisis.

Songlands, the final novel in Feffer’s Splinterlands trilogy, takes us into a climate-ravaged world where nations have fractured and a biotech corporation holds enormous power. Yet poetry, collective action, and a conscious, caring AI offer another way forward.

“Love is an important kind of operating system, if you will, to define one’s relations with the world.” — John Feffer

Portia Elan’s Homebound travels across 600 years, connecting a queer coder in 1985 with a smuggler in 2585. Their stories come together through grief, a mysterious video game, found family, and the moral choices that shape history.

“[AI] is a reflection of the values of the creators. I’m afraid of the human choices, not so much of the LLM choices.” — Portia Elan

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

[Episode 1036]

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Ada Ferrer on Keeper of My Kin + T.J. English on Havana & The Mob

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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

The Cuban Revolution transformed a nation. It also ended the Mob’s dream of turning Havana into the center of a global criminal empire. And it divided families.

Writer’s Voice talks with Cuban American historian Ada Ferrer about her memoir, Keeper of My Kin. When Ferrer was ten months old, her mother carried her out of Cuba without saying goodbye to Ferrer’s nine-year-old half-brother, Poli. The separation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted seventeen years.

“We tend to think that history happens up here or something, but all these historical events, their geopolitical decisions, they reverberate in individual lives, at the heart of families, in these really intimate spaces, in the space between people, family members who are separated, right?” — Ada Ferrer

Then Writer’s Voice returns to a 2008 interview with journalist T.J. English about Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. English describes how Meyer Lansky and other American mobsters allied themselves with dictator Fulgencio Batista, turning Havana into a glittering marketplace of casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, political corruption, and corporate profit.

“In that period, Havana became a kind of a paradise, a mobster’s paradise.” — T.J.English

The Mob hoped Cuba would become the base of a multinational empire. Instead, its exploitation of the island became a powerful symbol for the revolution that swept Batista and the gangsters from power.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

[Episode 1035]

Tags: Keeper of My Kin, Ada Ferrer, T.J. English, Havana Nocturne, Cuban Revolution, Cuba, Cuban history, Cuban exile, Cuban immigration, Mariel boatlift, Mafia in Cuba, Meyer Lansky, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro, Writer’s Voice, Francesca Rheannon,

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