Dante's Old South Radio Show Clifford Brooks

April 2024 Dante’s Old South

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2019-2020, she served as the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.

And, my social media so you can tag me: TwitterX: @januaryoneil | Instagram: @januarygilloneil | Facebook: /january.oneil 

Website: www.januarygilloneil.com



Robert Petrillo is a retired English teacher who’s currently on the editing team for the OLLI arts and literature journal at the University of Southern Maine, where he also facilitates a poetry workshop.  He’s been published in several literary journals, as well as in the anthology A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.  His first book, What Passes For a Life, is forthcoming from SCE Press.  He lives in Westbrook, Maine.

Social Media:   TwitterX:  @robpetrillo1  /  Facebook:  Robert Petrillo  / 

Email:  robertpetrillo111@gmail.com



Michael Jann is an Emmy-nominated late-night comedy writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon for over two decades. He currently teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension, and writes screenplays with his wife Michele Jourdan, a writer and a gold-medal winning bodybuilder. Michele likes working out so much, she actually married a dumbbell: Mike.

www.imdb.com/name/nm0417793/

Tae Lewis, a North Carolina native.  discovered his passion for music in church, sparked by Gospel melodies and a serendipitous encounter that led him to love country music at just 13. Despite initial resistance from his family, he immersed himself in the genre. Influenced by Rascal Flatts, Dan & Shay, and Vince Gill, who have all helped shape his distinct sound, making him a true standout in the music city.

His breakthrough came with a Sync Placement on the hit TV show "Shameless" for his track "Good Luvin," earning him national recognition. In the Summer of 2023, Tae was also named the Tractor Supply Emerging Artist of the year, receiving mentorship from country music superstars Lauren Alaina and Lainey Wilson. He is also recognized on Season 25 of THE VOICE. 

www.taelewis.com



Special Thanks Goes to:

Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com

UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu

The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com

Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com

The host, Clifford Brooks’, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order

Check out his Teachable course on creative writing as a profession here: brooks-sessions.teachable.com/p/the-working-writer

March 2024 Dante’s Old South



Chelsey Clammer is the award-winning author of the essay collections Human Heartbeat Detected (Red Hen Press, 2022), Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017), and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, and McSweeney’s, among many others. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. 

www.chelseyclammer.com



Dan Veach is the founding editor of Atlanta Review. A poet and translator of Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, Dan has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and an Independent Publisher Book Award. His books include Elephant Water, Lunchboxes, Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq, Beowulf & Beyond, Songs of The Cid, and Returning Home: The Poetry of Tao Yuan-ming. Dan has performed his poetry worldwide, including Oxford University, People’s University in Beijing, the American University in Cairo, and the Adelaide Festival in Australia.

https://irisbooks.com/authors/dan-veach/



Elizabeth Cox has published five novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry.  She has won the North Carolina Fiction Award, the Lillian Smith Award for a novel, and in 2013 she was awarded the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction. Cox taught creative writing at Duke for seventeen years, and also taught at Wofford College, Bennington College, Boston College, and MIT.  She resides in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

www.mupress.org/cw_contributorinfo.aspx?ContribID=6439&Name=Elizabeth+Barks+Cox



Music by:

Patrice Pike

Wilder Adkins

wilderadkins.bandcamp.com



Special Thanks Goes to:

Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com

UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu



The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com

Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com



The host, Clifford Brooks’, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order

Check out his Teachable course on creative writing as a profession here: brooks sessions.teachable.com/p/the-working-writer

February 2024 Dante’s Old South



Autumn Nicholas: (she/he/they/them) Autumn Nicholas is a gifted songwriter and performer who has amazed audiences around the country. Autumn is one of Music Forward Foundation's Emerging LGBTQ+ Artists for 2023 and one of Nashville Scene’s Country Music Almanac 2024 Artists to Watch.

www.autumnnicholas.com



Emily Strasser’s first book, Half-Life of a Secret, is a deeply researched memoir that traces her journey to reckon with the toxic legacies of secrecy of her grandfather’s work building nuclear weapons in the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Emily’s work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Gulf Coast, among others. She was also the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb.”

www.emilystrasser.com



Kayla Lookinghorse stands apart from other designers because of her hunkpapa/Itazipco Lakota/Dakota heritage and the way it is artfully woven into her designs. K. Lookinghorse is a contemporary brand that honors the designer’s heritage with an aesthetic specific to her tiospaye (family). Her signature symbols, three lines Horizontal pays homage to the past, present and future. As a mother, designer, artist, and tribal citizen, Kayla Lookinghorse has forged her own path by creating iconic printed dresses and signature jackets which are the cornerstone of the K.lookinghorse brand. Working toward bridging the gap and creating space for Authentic-Inspired Native design, not Native-Inspired.

From her creations to your closest shop, her collections naturally empower through storytelling and design.

www.klookinghorse.com



Wilder Adkins is a folk musician, dad, librarian, and gardener from Birmingham, AL. He loves the weight of handmade quilts, and his songs are kind of heavy and comfortable like that. In late summer he can be found every day out by the fig tree scaring away the birds and looking for ripe fruit (for making jam). In winter, he retreats into a cave to sleep for three months and process all that he’s learned that year. He’s friendly, but you might have to speak to him first. His songs call on an array of influences but frequently touch on the topics of Hope & Sorrow, Faith & Doubt, and sometimes flowers.

www.wilderadkins.com



Ellen Bass’s poetry collections include Indigo, Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The NEA, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. With Florence Howe, she co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! and she co-authored the groundbreaking, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth—and Their Allies. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails, and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program. 

www.ellenbass.com



Special Thanks Goes to:

Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com

UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu

The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com

Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com



The host, Clifford Brooks’, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena

Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of

Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order



Check out his Teachable courses on thriving with autism and creative writing as a

profession here: brooks-sessions.teachable.com/p/the-working-writer

January 2024 Dante’s Old South

Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road (Viking), a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (Penguin), Dig Safe (Penguin), Backwards Days (Penguin), Standing on Z (Unicorn), Children with Enemies (Chicago), and The Lookout Man (Chicago).

His newest work is Andalusian Visions (Unicorn), a book of poetry, photography, and music with international collaborators Cyril Caine and Laurent Estoppey.

His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous national and international anthologies, such as Best American Poetry, Good Poems, and the Pushcart Prize. He is the recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation. and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. 

www.stuartdischellpoetry.com



Rissi Palmer’s gift lies in reaching across all musical boundaries. While she made her mark in Country Music, she is equally at home in R&B music, bringing the entire spectrum of popular music to bear on music she calls “Southern Soul.”

The daughter of Georgia natives, Rissi was born near Pittsburgh, PA and spent her adolescent years in St. Louis, Missouri. Raised in a musical family that loved both country and R&B, Rissi was part of a singing and dancing troupe sponsored by a local television station at age 16, and by the time she was 19 years old, she had already been offered her first publishing and label deal.

A few highlights throughout her musical career include performances at The White House, New York's Lincoln Center and multiple appearances on the Grand Ole Opry.

She has toured extensively across the country and has made numerous national appearances on Oprah & Friends, CMT Insider, CNN, CBS This Morning, GMA, Entertainment Tonight, and FOX Soul's "The Book of Sean" and has been featured in Associated Press, Ebony, Essence, Huffington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, NPR's "All Things Considered", PEOPLE, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

www.RissiPalmerMusic.com.

Justin Hamm's most recent book is Drinking Guinness with the Dead: Poems 2007-2021 (Spartan Press 2022). He is the Executive Editor of the Museum of Americana and the creator of Poet Baseball Cards. His poems, photos, stories, and reviews appear in numerous journals. He is a 2022 Woody Guthrie Poet and a recipient of the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. 

www.justinhamm.net

Heather Hartley is the author of Adult Swim and Knock Knock both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was the long-time Paris editor at Tin House magazine. Her short fiction, essays, poems and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review, Slice and other venues. She has presented writers at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris and has taught creative writing at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA Online program.

She teaches in the Master’s program at the University of Kent (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture. 

www.heatherhartleyink.com



Additional Music by:

Wilder Adkins

https://wilderadkins.com/

https://wilderadkins.bandcamp.com/



Special Thanks Goes to:

Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com

UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu

The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com

Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com

The host, Clifford Brooks’, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order

Check out his Teachable courses on thriving with autism and creative writing as a profession here: brooks-sessions.teachable.com/p/the-working-writer

December 2023 Dante’s Old South

The Boxmasters (JD Andrew and Billy Bob Thornton): As a touring band, The Boxmasters have cultivated a rabid cult fanbase across the United States and Canada. Opening for the likes of ZZ Top, Steve Miller, George Thorogood and Kid Rock, The Boxmasters have proven to win over large audiences. As a headliner, frequent stops in Kansas City at “Knuckleheads”, Springfield, Illinois at “Boondocks” and “Merrimack Hall” in Huntsville, Alabama have shown dedicated yet still growing audiences. The Boxmasters performed on “The Grand Ole Opry” in 2015, another in a growing resume of must-play venues. https://theboxmasters.com/

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is an author, editor, & ghostwriter. He is Author of three poetry collections, Fight or Flight, Visiting Hours, and Ghost Gear; Assistant Director of the Owsley Fork Writer & Sanctuary; Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.com, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days; and Acquisitions Editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books. Connect with him at AndrewMK.com or via social media.

www.andrewMK.com

Poemoftheweek.com

Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), garnered five awards including first place for Best First Book in the 2021 IPPY Awards. Susan has won numerous awards for her short fiction. Her second novel, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel, (Mercer University Press, September 2023) has been named a finalist in the American Book Fest Awards, is a 2023 Shelf Unbound Notable 100 book, and has been nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC.

Learn more at www.susanzurenda.com

Stevie Edwards is the author of Quiet Armor, Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of North Texas.

Connor Judson Garrett is a storyteller and a Co-founder of Lucid House Publishing. His obsession with words led him to treat his own life like a story, chasing experiences from Los Angeles to Beirut, Lebanon, while building brands and writing books along the way. Garrett is the author of the novel Falling Up in The City of Angels and the co-author of the Book Excellence Awards Finalist in the Young Adult genre Spellbound Under The Spanish Moss.

LucidHousePublishing.com

PublishProfitably.com

Kevin N. Garrett is an advertising and lifestyle photographer has won awards for clients that include Audi, Google, The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Nike, Westin, The Ritz-Carlton Company, the states of Georgia and New Mexico, and Norwegian Cruise Lines. 

KevinGarrett.com

Nicole Witt is a nationally touring, award-winning songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known for her soaring melodies and clever turns of phrase. She just released her first EP “Clear” and finished her first-ever solo European tour.

www.nicolewitt.com

Insta, FB, YOUTUBE, TikTok: @nicolewittmusic

Additional Music by:

Wilder Adkins:

https://wilderadkins.com/

Special Thanks Goes to:

Wild Honey Tees: www.wildhoneytees.com

Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com

UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu

The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com

Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com



The host, Clifford Brooks’, The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order

Check out his Teachable courses on thriving with autism and creative writing

November 2023 Dante’s Old South

Richard Blanco

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent,

Homeland of My Body, which reassesses traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exists outside us, but rather, within us.

He has also authored the memoirs FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY and THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD.

Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees.

Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

FB: @RichardBlancoPoetry

IG: @poetrichardblanco

Twitter: @rblancopoet 

Website: https://richard-blanco.com/



Christa Wells is a singer-songwriter based in Nashville, Tennessee, with 20+ years of experience in the music industry.  As an independent artist, Christa has released seven solo albums plus several collaborations, developing a signature alt-pop sound that is fresh, soulful and enduring. Her recent albums Velveteen, Pacific, and Redwood chronicle her healing journey through suffering into awakening and aliveness. She has self-published two collections of poetry and prose (Beloved and Before It Gets Lighter) with a third on the way.

Wells is also co-founder of ARTIST AND, a creative community which seeks to empower artists through a variety of workshops, retreats and a nine-month creative mastermind program.

An award-winning songwriter, Christa has written hit songs for and with Nashville artists such as Natalie Grant, Plumb, and Ellie Holcomb.

WEBSITE: https://www.christawellsmusic.com/

ARTIST AND: https://www.artistand.org/

PATREON PAGE: https://www.patreon.com/christawells

MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/christa-wells/419222522



Meet Misty Ann, the powerhouse behind Wild Honey Tees, a Southern mama-owned t-shirt haven. With a heart as warm as a Georgia summer and a keen sense of Southern charm, she infuses her designs with a touch of hospitality. From sweet tea sippin' to front porch rockin', Misty's tees capture the essence of Southern living, making her business a true reflection of mama's love and grace.

www.wildhoneytees.com

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings (W.W. Norton, 2023), The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. He is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents and lives in Los Angeles.

Special Thanks Goes to:

Wild Honey Tees: www.wildhoneytees.com

Lucid House Press: www.lucidhousepublishing.com

UCLA Extension Writing Program: www.uclaextension.edu

The Crown: www.thecrownbrasstown.com

Mercer University Press: www.mupress.org

The Red Phone Booth: www.redphonebooth.com

The host, Clifford Brooks’ , The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods are available everywhere books are sold. His chapbook, Exiles of Eden, is only available through his website: www.cliffbrooks.com/how-to-order

Check out his Teachable courses on thriving with autism and creative writing as a profession here: brooks-sessions.teach