Awakeners

Lena Crown
  • 5.0 (10)
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This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts.  Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.  Website: awakenerspodcast.com

  1. Gabrielle Bates & Keetje Kuipers

    09/23/2025

    Gabrielle Bates & Keetje Kuipers

    On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the poets Gabrielle Bates and Keetje Kuipers, who met when Gabby enrolled in Keetje’s poetry class at Auburn University in Alabama almost thirteen years ago. According to Gabby, she thought all poets were dead, so Keetje’s class was a revelation. They read Richard Siken, Terrance Hayes, A.E. Stallings, and Dorianne Laux, Keetje’s own mentor. They began corresponding about poems, and when Keetje later left her tenure-track job to move to Seattle, where Gabby was living after her MFA (and still is), they formed a writing group with a few other local poetesses, to crib Gabby’s word, and became something more like peers.  We joke in this episode that Keetje is Gabby’s personal archivist: she came prepared with poems from the first packet Gabby ever sent seeking feedback, as well as an email exchange from 2014 and an introduction Keetje wrote for one of Gabby’s readings from the same year. In the second half of the episode, we get to hear excerpts from all three, and Gabby and Keetje read aloud several poems from their most recent books, JUDAS GOAT and LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS.  We track some wonderfully eerie resonances across their work, including encounters with animals, patriarchal violence, the general attraction to discomfort, the contrast between ‘now’ and ‘then,’ dialogue with other women, and poem endings that ask new questions. We discuss why it’s empowering to write while housesitting and what the difference might be between the "scariest thing” in a poem and its “heart.” And reader: we all cry a little bit. Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023; the87press, 2025), an NPR Best Book of 2023 and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Believer, Sewanee Review, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares.  Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poems is Lonely Women Make Good Lovers. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She lives in Montana and is Editor of Poetry Northwest. More Gabby: https://www.gabriellebat.es/ More Keetje: https://keetjekuipers.com/ Mentioned in the episode: Dorianne Laux and Garret Hongo (sp?) Paisley Rekdal Camille Dungy Crush by Richard Siken Chantel Acevedo Bob Wrigley Corrie Williamson Tracy K. Smith See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1h 25m
  2. Nicole Chung & Tajja Isen

    08/26/2025

    Nicole Chung & Tajja Isen

    On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the nonfiction writers Tajja Isen and Nicole Chung, who became colleagues and friends after working together on an essay for Catapult, a (now sadly shuttered) digital magazine where Nicole served as editor. After collaborating to publish Tajja’s essay, Nicole brought Tajja onto the magazine’s editorial staff, and eventually Tajja succeeded Nicole as Editor in Chief. In the first half of the episode, Tajja and Nicole read aloud from their first email exchange, including Tajja’s pitch and Nicole’s feedback. We get into the nitty gritty of what this kind of editorial back-and-forth looks like—including the time Tajja took between drafts—and discuss how their mutual admiration as writer and editor grew into an enduring friendship (and how Nicole knew Tajja would make a good editor after seeing her revise her own work).  In the second half of the episode, we discuss how writing and editing feed one another, and how Tajja and Nicole have maintained their identities as writers alongside their identities as editors and champions of other writers’ work. We end with a peek into the thinking behind Tajja’s next book, Tough Love, a memoir about mentorship, control, desire, and the anxiety of influence. Nicole Chung is the author of the award-winning memoir A Living Remedy, which was named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen other outlets. Her 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chung has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Slate, and many other publications. Tajja Isen is the author of the essay collection Some of My Best Friends, named a Best Book of the Year by outlets including Electric Literature and The Globe and Mail. She is a contributing writer for The Walrus, for which she received an honorable mention at the 2024 National Magazine Awards. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Black Mountain Institute, the Ucross Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She also edits for Orion magazine and works as a cartoon voice actor. Her next book, Tough Love, is a memoir of mentorship. More Nicole: nicolechung.net More Tajja: tajjaisen.com Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. Mentioned in the episode: Catapult (RIP) Periplus Fellowship Yuka Igarashi, Editor at Graywolf Jess Zimmerman at Electric Lit Gordon Lisch Elizabeth Hardwick See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1h 10m
  3. Aditi Machado & Carl Phillips

    08/06/2025

    Aditi Machado & Carl Phillips

    On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the poets Carl Phillips and Aditi Machado, who met through the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis when Aditi began as a student almost fifteen years ago. Growing up in India, Aditi wasn’t exposed to much American poetry. Carl could tell, reading her work, that this was a singular voice—he even remembers thinking to himself that Aditi’s style made him want to reconsider his own approach.  In the first half of the episode, we discuss what surprised Carl about Aditi’s work, how Carl’s experience as a high school Latin teacher informed his pedagogy, and what Aditi remembers from her time as Carl’s student (and has borrowed, now that she’s a professor herself). We also discuss what Carl prioritized as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in the U.S. And as a bonus, Aditi shares an excerpt from a hilarious and enthusiastic journal entry she wrote after one of her early meetings with Carl to discuss her work. In the second half of the episode, we hear poems from their newest books, Aditi’s “Concerning Matters Culinary” from Material Witness and Carl’s “Fist and Palm” from Scattered Snows, to the North. We discuss their radically different approaches to form and process, what it means to get “personal” in their poetry, and their shared interest in the agency of the natural world, a subtle materialism that thrums through both collections. (In other words: Lena makes the argument that their work isn’t as different as it seems.) Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her publications include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020), and Some Beheadings (2017); two book-length translations from the French, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof, 2025) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016); and several chapbooks. Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals like BOMB, Chicago Review, Fence, jubilat, Lana Turner, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, among others. A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Carl Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, including Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. More Aditi: aditimachado.com More Carl: https://www.carlphillipspoet.com/ Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. Read Carl’s poem “Fist and Palm”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158812/fist-and-palm Mentioned in the episode: Martín Espada Alan Dugan Mary Jo Bang Jorie Graham John Ashbery Johannes Jorgensen, Transgressive Circulation Brigit Pegeen Kelly Rosemary Walddrop, The Reproduction of Profiles Gerard Manley Hopkins See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1h 6m
  4. Tash Aw & Jemimah Wei

    07/01/2025

    Tash Aw & Jemimah Wei

    On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the novelists Tash Aw and Jemimah Wei, who connected when Jemimah signed up for Tash’s fiction master class on “time and place” in Singapore back in 2015.  Growing up in Malaysia and Singapore, Tash and Jemimah remember having almost no models for what it might look like to be a writer. The publishing industry – and the literary world – seemed to be headquartered elsewhere. This is why it was so important to Tash to return to his region to teach: to show young writers there what was possible. After Jemimah had been writing for a while, Tash suggested Jemimah look into graduate school in creative writing, and later he connected her with his literary agent, who now represents them both. Ten years after the master class, their new books were released within weeks of one another, and Jemimah even traveled back to Singapore to help Tash launch his novel in the place where they met. In the first half of the episode, we discuss why Jemimah stood out to Tash in class, how to make a writing life (especially coming from outside the U.S.), being “genre-agnostic,” revising book-length projects, and what to look for in a literary agent.  In the second half of the episode, Jemimah and Tash share an excerpt from THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER and THE SOUTH, and we zoom in on the very themes from Tash’s master class ten years ago: time and place. We focus especially on the factors that influence how we experience time – things like age and maturity level, as well as culture, labor, economics, and the pressure to produce or succeed – and also how we experience time as readers through craft elements like verb tense and perspective, or what Jemimah calls the narrator’s “narrative perch” with respect to past or present events. Jemimah says, “Sometimes when you fall outside the stream of time, you can’t climb back in. Time keeps moving forward.”  Tash Aw is the author of five novels and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. As an essayist and critic, he has contributed to the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York Times and the Guardian, among many other publications. He is currently a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin.  Jemimah Wei is the author of THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER. Born and raised in Singapore, she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemmingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, Joyland, amongst others. For close to a decade, Jemimah was a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon.  More Jemimah: https://jemmawei.com/ More Tash: https://www.instagram.com/tash.aw/?hl=en Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1h 18m
  5. Lydi Conklin & Melissa Febos

    06/10/2025

    Lydi Conklin & Melissa Febos

    On the first episode of Season 2 of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the writers Melissa Febos and Lydi Conklin, who met at the MacDowell artist residency back in 2011.  Melissa had just published Whip Smart, her first book, a propulsive memoir about her experience working as a professional dominatrix in a dungeon in New York. Lydi was still an MFA student when they met Melissa—this was back when MacDowell let you attend the residency as a grad student—and according to Lydi, they desperately wanted to be Melissa’s friend. Now, more than ten years later, in this episode you’ll hear Melissa call Lydi her most reliable reader.  We cover what it’s like to be at a writing residency like MacDowell, Lydi’s first (slightly hilarious) appearance at Melissa’s studio door, memorable margin notes they’ve exchanged, the abandoned projects they wish the other would return to, and the advice Melissa gave Lydi that kept them from doing something, quote, “wildly inappropriate.” In the second half of the conversation, we turn more explicitly to their new books. We discuss queerness, world-building, and the research process behind The Dry Season and Songs of No Provenance, including the choice Melissa almost made that could have produced a very different book.  Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and the forthcoming memoir The Dry Season. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa. Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in June 2025 from Catapult in the US and Vintage in the UK. More Lydi: https://lydia-conklin.com/ More Melissa: https://www.melissafebos.com/ Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. Mentioned in the episode: MacDowell artist residency Melissa’s first memoir, Whip Smart Lydi’s first story collection, Rainbow Rainbow Melissa’s Abandon Me and Girlhood Young Jean Lee Kirsten Valdez Quade Brenda Shaughnessy Portrait of a Lady by Henry James See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    58 min
  6. Re-Awakeners: Tiana Clark

    03/04/2025

    Re-Awakeners: Tiana Clark

    On this special bonus episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with writer Tiana Clark about the person who first told her she was a poet: her late mentor and high school teacher, Mr. Bill Brown. Tiana was a rebellious teenager. “They’re talking about you in the teacher’s lounge,” Mr. Brown warned her once. But instead of punishing Tiana for acting out, Mr. Brown gifted her the poetry of Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, and Sharon Olds, writers whose work broke all the rules Tiana had learned in school. He continued to support Tiana for the next twenty years, cheering her on through her MFA applications, her chapbook publication, and the publication of her first book. In the first half of the episode, we discuss Mr. Brown’s legacy in Tiana’s poetry, pedagogy, and attention to the natural world (since he could name every tree on their walks around the neighborhood). Later on, Tiana reads “Broken Sestina Reaching for Black Joy” from her new collection Scorched Earth, a poem that illuminates the darker history behind the pedestrian greenway where Tiana walked every day in the pandemic, and where she saw Mr. Brown for the last time. We talk about the form of the sestina and what it means to “break” it or “fail” at it. We also cover Tiana’s revised future as a historian, the politics of traveling (and writing about travel) as a Black woman, and the elegy form as an attempt to resurrect those we’ve lost.  Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com. This episode marks the end of Season 1, but stay tuned in summer for Season 2! Subscribe and connect with us on our website for updates: awakenerspodcast.com. More Tiana: https://www.tianaclark.com/ Order Scorched Earth, out March 4, 2025: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scorched-Earth/Tiana-Clark/9781668052075 Definition of pastoral: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/pastoral Definition of sestina: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/sestina Definition of elegy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/elegy Definition of ekphrasis: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ekphrasis Mentioned in the episode:  Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis Wheatley, Rick Barot, Maggie Nelson See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    58 min
  7. T Bambrick & Jane Miller

    02/18/2025

    T Bambrick & Jane Miller

    On this episode of Awakeners, Lena chats with writers T Bambrick and Jane Miller, who were connected by some fellow poets in Tucson when T found themselves at a crossroads in their writing. Jane had just retired from teaching (for the first time), but they began to meet regularly over brunch to talk about—well, everything.  We discuss the advice from Jane that helped T write their first book, a searing poetry collection about working a cleanup crew around a dam in Washington. We talk about moments of crisis in artmaking, how to write about harmful experiences without making yourself sad, and when and why we might want to write “small” or take up more space on the page. In the second half of the episode, T reads aloud a poem from their book Intimacies, Received inspired by a line from one of Jane’s poems, and Jane shares a poem about artmaking from Paper Banners. Bonus: we follow T down a research rabbit hole about the violent political history of skunks. T says: “Jane told me, Say somebody hit you with a wooden spoon. You might write a book about spoons or wood. You can work your way around the site of the most intense pain, finding something to dive into and obsess over.” Jane Miller has written twelve poetry books, most recently Paper Banners and Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and two collections of essays, Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel and From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Jane has taught in several MFA programs, including The University of Arizona, The Michener Center for Writers, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. T Bambrick is the author of Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press 2022), and Vantage (American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award 2019). Their work can be found in the New Yorker, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and is a Dornsife Fellow in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Southern California. Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com. More T: https://www.taneumbambrick.com/ More Jane: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/authors/jane-miller/ Mentioned in the episode: T Bambrick’s poem “Traveling”: https://missourireview.com/taneum-bambrick-traveling/ C.D. Wright Viet Thanh Nguyen See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    57 min
  8. Firefeet: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, CJ Hauser, Charlie Beckerman, and Emily Alford

    02/04/2025

    Firefeet: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, CJ Hauser, Charlie Beckerman, and Emily Alford

    On this episode of Awakeners, Lena gets temporarily inducted into a writing group called the Firefeet by writers Emily Alford, Charlie Beckerman, CJ Hauser and Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, who have been keeping their “feet to the fire”—in other words, keeping weekly goal-setting and accountability email threads—for the past ten years. The four connected through the graduate programs in creative writing at Florida State University, and they’ve supported one another through novel drafting, book publication, family struggles, job changes, and more over the course of a decade.  We discuss how the Firefeet came together, what makes them good readers of one another’s work, the “signature moves” that characterize each of their writing, and what they’ve learned about writing group best practices. In the second half of the episode, we define four key terms in Firefeet lingo, and we go around the circle and perform one of the Firefeet's weekly check-ins. We also celebrate Olivia, whose week is extra special: the publication of this podcast episode coincides with the pub date for Mutual Interest, her new queer historical novel about a love triangle in Gilded-Age New York. Emily Alford is a writer living in New Orleans. A former staff writer at Jezebel, her work has also appeared in Publishers Weekly, Iron Horse, Gawker, and elsewhere. She teaches at Tulane and is hard at work on a noir novel. You can find pictures of her 15-year-old cocker spaniel on Instagram (@emilyalicealford) and rants at the TV on Bluesky (@alfordalice).  Charlie Beckerman is a writer who claims both San Francisco and New York as his hometown. His fiction has appeared in Glassworks and The Quail Bell Review, and his memoir podcast, Serial Dater, is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. He has written other nonfiction for Greatist, Thrillist, and worked as a political writer for Bustle during the 2016 Presidential Election. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to the United Kingdom, and he is working on his PhD in Fiction at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently seeking representation for his queer historical fiction novel set in London during the Second World War. He is @chozzles everywhere on social media, and you can find more information at www.charliebeckerman.com. CJ Hauser is a genderqueer and genrequeer writer who teaches at Colgate University. They are the author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays and Family of Origin: A Novel. You can find them trying to keep their chin up and disseminating dog pictures on substack @dopaminedog. Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (@owolfgangsmith) is the author of Mutual Interest (out Feb 4, 2025 from Bloomsbury) and Glassworks, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her partner. More at https://www.awakenerspodcast.com/. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    1h 34m
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About

This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts.  Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.  Website: awakenerspodcast.com

Information

  • Creator
    Lena Crown
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2024 Literary Hub
  • Show Website
    Awakeners