SEASON ONE GUESTS
Rachel Louise Snyder
Photo Credit: Don Rutledge
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No Visible Bruises (Bloomsbury Press) May 7, 2019
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Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: May 15, 2019, (Re-Air May 22)
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Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.
Her print work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New Republic, and others. In 2003, she relocated from Chicago to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and became a contributor for the public radio shows “Marketplace” and “All Things Considered.”
Currently, Snyder is an Associate Professor Creative Writing and Journalism at American University in Washington, DC.
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Julie Langsdorf
Photo Credit: Robin B. Langsdorf
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White Elephant (Ecco/Harper Collins) -March 26, 2019
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Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: May 29, 2019 (Re-Air June 5)
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Julie Langsdorf has received four fiction grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and her short stories have appeared in several literary magazines. She lives, writes, and teaches yoga in Washington, D.C.
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“Langsdorf’s wry debut captures the fallout as neighbors turn on one another, trees are set on fire and the town seems poised to fall apart.”
-The New York Times, 12 New Books to Watch for in March
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Feature article: Washington Post
Los Angeles Times: A Most Anticipated Debut Novel
Angie Kim
Photo Credit: Tim Coburn
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"Miracle Creek" (Sarah Crichton Books- FSG) April 16, 2019
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Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: June 12, 2019 (Re-Air June 19)
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Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. She attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, then practiced as a trial lawyer at Williams & Connolly. Her stories have won the Glamour Essay Contest and the Wabash Prize in Fiction, and appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, The Asian American Literary Review, and PANK. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and three sons.
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Helon Habila
Photo Credit: Heike Steinweg
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"Travelers" (W.W. Norton & Company) June, 18 2019
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Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: June 26, 2019 (Re-Air July 3)
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Helon Habila was born in Nigeria. He studied English Language and Literature at the University of Jos. In 1999 he moved to Lagos, where he worked for the magazine Hints; he later moved on to Vanguard Newspaper as Literary Editor. “Love Poems”, one of the stories in this collection, received the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001, which catapulted Habila onto the international stage.
His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, came out in 2002. It went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book (Africa Region). After winning the Caine Prize, Habila was invited to be the first African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where he stayed as a Chevening Scholar, and later as a PhD Candidate, from 2002-2007.
In 2005 Habila was invited by Chinua Achebe to become the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, New York. He spent a year writing and teaching at Bard, and after his fellowship, Habila stayed on in America as a professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In 2012 he was invited to address the Library of Congress in the Conversations with African Poets and Writers Series.
Habila divides his time between his native Nigeria, and the USA where he lives with his wife and three children.
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"Travelers" is a New & Noteworthy Book - New York Times (June 11, 2019)
Related Article: WSJ April 9, 2019 "The Real Berlin: A Traveler's Journey Beyond the Grim Spy
Clichés"
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Jennifer Cody Epstein
Photo Credit: Julie Brown
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"Wunderland" (Crown-Penguin/Random House) April 23, 2019
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Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: July 10, 2019 (Re-Air July 17)
Jennifer's prior works include The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, winner of the 2014 Asian Pacific Association of Librarians Honor award for outstanding fiction, as well as the international bestseller The Painter from Shanghai.
She has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Nation (Thailand), Self and Mademoiselle magazines, and the NBC and HBO networks, working in Kyoto, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok as well as Washington D.C. and New York. She has taught at Columbia University in New York and Doshisha University in Kyoto, and has an MFA from Columbia, a Masters of International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a BA in Asian Studies/English from Amherst College.
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Jennifer currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, filmmaker Michael Epstein and two daughters.
Peter Guzzardi
Photo Credit: Amy Stern Photography
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Real Fiction Radio Broadcast Dates: August 7 Re-air August 14
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"Emeralds of Oz" Harper Wave
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Peter Guzzardi has worked in publishing for more than forty years. Prominent books he has edited include Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Deepak Chopra's Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Queen Noor's Leap of Faith, Arianna Huffington's Fanatics and Fools and Paula Poundstone's There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say. An independent editor and writer, he lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Caroline Leavitt
Real Fiction Radio Broadcast: July 24, 2019 (Re-Air July 31)
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Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Various titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines.
Her ninth novel, Pictures of You, went into three printings months before publication and is now in its fourth printing. A New York Times bestseller, it was also a Costco "Pennie's Pick," A San Francisco Chronicle Editor's Choice "Lit Pick," and was one of the top 20 books published so far in 2011, as named by BookPage. Pictures of You was also on the Best Books of 2011 lists from The San Francisco Chronicle, The Providence Journal, Bookmarks Magazine and Kirkus Reviews.
Her novel, Is This Tomorrow is a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick/Editor's Choice, a Jewish Book Council Bookclub Pick, a WNBA National Great Group Reads, a May Indie Next Pick,
Her next novel, With or Without You will be published by Algonquin Books in Spring 2020.
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Caroline has been a judge in both the Writers' Voice Fiction Awards in New York City and the Midatlantic Arts Grants in Fiction. She teaches novel writing online at both Stanford University and UCLA Extension Writers Program, as well as working with writers privately.
Caroline has appeared on The Today Show, Diane Rehm, Weekend Edition, German and Canadian TV, and more, and she has been featured on The View From The Bay. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, New York City's unofficial sixth borough, with her husband, the writer Jeff Tamarkin, and they have an actor son, Max.
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