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Lesley Nneka Arimah is joining us to talk about her book, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky: Stories. Lesley was selected as a National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honoree last year.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In “Who Will Greet You at Home,” a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild,” a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person" - with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.
Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her. Women's rights advocate and president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Cecile Richards, joins us for a discussion of her new book, Make Trouble.
Richards has been an activist since 7th grade, when she was taken to the principal's office for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. She had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist-turned-Texas governor mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all at the same time. 
Contributors discuss “Things We Haven’t Said,” a powerful new anthology of writing by survivors of sexual violence.
Edited by YA writer and librarian Erin Moulton, “Things We Haven’t Said” collects poems, essays, letters, vignettes and interviews written written by a diverse group of adults who survived sexual violence as children and adolescents.
Erin E. Moulton is the author of FLUTTER, TRACING STARS, CHASING THE MILKY WAY, and KEEPERS OF THE LABYRINTH. Her books have been selected and nominated for national and state award lists, such as the Amelia Bloomer list, the Kentucky Bluegrass Master List and the Isinglass Teen Read Award List. She also works as teen librarian at the Derry Public Library where she maintains a collection of awesome YA books and leads teen programming.
Barbara McLean hid the injuries from a childhood sexual assault for many years and, as an adult, became involved in an abusive relationship. Eventually, Barbara enrolled in a master's program to study social policy with the desire to change how sexual assault survivors perceive themselves. Today, she works for a Violence Intervention and Treatment Program in Brooklyn, NY, and she volunteers on a sexual assault hotline as well as in a local emergency room.
G. Donald Cribbs has written and published poetry and short stories since high school. He is also a drug and alcohol counselor at the Discovery House in Harrisburg, PA, and holds a master's degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling (MA). He and his wife and four boys reside in central Pennsylvania where the author is hard at work on his next book, the sequel to his debut novel, THE PACKING HOUSE.
Maya Demri started her artistic life at age 4 when she found the magic of ballet and the freedom in painting. Over the years she studied visual arts, dance, acting and singing professionally. In college she discovered her soul's talent of writing and became an author as well. She believes that arts can truly heal and awaken humanity's consciousness.
Jane Cochrane is a poet and a journalist. Originally from North Carolina, she recently graduated from college in Los Angeles with a degree in creative writing. She now lives in New York City. 
Clemantine Wamariya discusses her new memoir and how it's affected her life, her work, and the writing she creates.
About THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.
When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old.
In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms. 
Alexander Chee | How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” explores Alexander Chee’s life as a man, a writer, and an activist. Collectively, the essays form Chee’s manifesto on how we form our identities in the creative world, mixing life, literature, and politics to reveal how the lessons he learned from reading and writing have shaped who he is. In these essays he morphs from a student to a teacher, reader to writer, and considers his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean-American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He recalls formative experiences of his life and the country’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, writing his first novel, and the election of Donald Trump.
Alexander Chee is the author of the national best-seller “The Queen of the Night.”
Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer with bylines at the Village Voice, Los Angeles Review of Books, author of “Capsid: A Love Song” and “INSIDE/OUT,” and cohost of the Food 4 Thot podcast. 
We’re sitting down with Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons: Poems. Hutchinson won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2016 for House of Lords and Commons.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.
These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience. 
National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann introduces “Carbon Ideologies,” his new two-volume exploration of the causes and consequences global warming.
Over the years William T. Vollmann has earned critical acclaim by tackling some of the largest and thorniest issues of our times, including poverty, violence, and American imperialism. In “Carbon Ideologies,” Vollmann turns to one of the greatest crises we have ever faced: global warming.
“No Immediate Danger,” volume one of the series, examines the technological and cultural forces that created climate change—manufacturing, agriculture, fossil fuel extraction and the global demand for electric power—leading to a detailed case study of the brutal 2011 tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdowns in Fukushima, Japan. For seven years, at great personal risk, Vollmann traveled to the no-go zones and ghost towns of Fukushima to interview tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers and pro-nuclear utility workers. With his signature wit and meticulous, wide-ranging research, “No Immediate Danger” builds a powerful picture of one of the greatest environmental disasters in recent history.
Volume two, “No Good Alternative,” coming in June 2018, focuses on human experiences related to coal mining and natural gas production.
