April 25, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio I welcome a local hero and celebrate the 40th anniversary reprint edition of his landmark book of prison letters: Jeff Dietrich of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. His Reluctant Resister, a classic of nonviolent resistance literature, is a defining example of the letters of a prisoner of conscience. Loyola Marymount Institute has just reissued the book. We talk, and he reads from it in the first of a two-part show. By turns thoughtful and humorous, the letters are a memoir, meditation, documentary account, and philosophical interrogation of the war machine and the carceral state by a person of faith who challenged authority, took its punishment but ultimately, won.

April 18, 2023. This week, the rebroadcast of a show admired by and requested by many over the years. (You're welcome!) I replay my 2012 interview with the smart, prescient and insightful Corey Robin on his groundbreaking —- and enduring! —- The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. In the decade since I hosted him he's become a leading go-to political scientist and analyst, with his recent The Enigma of Clarence Thomas more perversely relevant than ever. The reactionary Supreme Court Justice has rich friends, no kidding.

April 11, 2023. My guest this week is Terena Elizabeth Bell, a writer whose exciting embrace of nearly every available form both challenges the expectation of story and fully engages its opportunities, demands and, lately, urgent requirements. In Tell Me What You See: Ten Stories, Bell chronicles our recent desperate past but also projects its aesthetics of fascism and pandemic onto a science fiction present and future as the everyday moments of family, community and informed resistance. Think Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut and be engaged. The title story is a January 6 perspective buster, and her journal-style New York pandemic tale is a rebuke to all the purposeful forgetting of late about the deaths of millions.

Tuesday, April 4, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio, poet Gustavo Hernandez, author of a debut poetry collection, Flower Grand First. The reference is to streets in Santa Ana, California, but the collection's broader ambitions, to memoir, queer coming-of-age story, Mexican immigrant family chronicle, and politics, are vividly realized in short, complex and, ultimately, reconciling poems with an emphasis on people and place, past and present.

March 28, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK’s weekly literary arts show, I feature acclaimed nonfiction writer Tom Zoellner. His most recent book is about his home state, its history, politics and geography and, importantly, his growing-up there. All of it is told through a long 800-mile (!) trek from the Grand Canyon to the Mexico border, a walking and remembering and researching and, finally revelatory journey on the “Arizona Trail.” Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona is a personal encyclopedia, a field guide to people and politics, and a gorgeously told memoir --- both an adventure and a reckoning.

March 21, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio, my conversation with playwright, art critic, novelist and short story writer Yxta Maya Murray, whose newest book, God Went Like That, combines scientific research, history, the formal elements of documentary and interviews toward reconstructing in fiction the story of the long if hidden history of contamination and health dangers caused at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Imagine John Dos Passos meets Anna Deveare Smith, through an EPA investigator’s telling of the real-life effects on workers, children, lab techs, lawyers and activists. Startlingly intimate, beautiful, and brave, her writing combines research, drama, imagination, politics and voice in another experimental meets realist meets poetic reimagining of our political moment.

March 14, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio, Part II of my 2013 conversation --- including reading and song --- with the late Uncle Ruthie Buell. Uncle Ruthie was a teacher, activist, singer-songwriter, poet and exuberant advocate. She hosted the excellent family show Halfway Down the Stairs for half a century, on KPFK --- where else? Check out her CDs The Jacaranda Tree and The Mystery of Time, and her poetry collection Come to My Voice. Thanks for listening. We miss you, Uncle Ruthie!

Here's a review, and an appreciation by another friend, the singer-songwriter and activist Ross Altman. https://folkworks.org/.../uncle-ruthie-buell-the.../

March 7, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio, Uncle Ruthie Buell, KPFK’s longest running on-air voice. She died last month. Her Halfway Down the Stairs program exemplified the best of our station; her award-winning songs and poetry brought joy and courage. For Women’s History Month, this year themed, yes, “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories,” join me in remembering, celebrating, and singing along with songwriter, performer, storyteller, activist Uncle Ruthie in a special rebroadcast of part one of my 2013 conversation with her. I’ll share part two next week, and include the link to my OC Weekly column on her published at about the same time as I recorded with Ruthie in Studio C at KPFK:

https://www.ocweekly.com/come-to-her-voice-uncle-ruthie.../

February 28, 2023.This week on Bibliocracy Radio, KPFK’s weekly books show, I feature a multi-form book with portraits of a city, its citizens and writers, polemic, revelatory history and a family story.You’ll love my conversation with novelist, scholar and memoirist Keenan Norris, author of Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, a collective memoir of Black intellectual and cultural life, a consideration of the role of a city by way of the author’s father, Richard Wright and Barack Obama, the Great Migration, and the love of a son for his family.

February 21, 2023.This week KPFK's weekly books show welcomes back JERRY STAHL, perhaps the only writer who could, or would, chronicle a concentration camp bus tour, with the reliably self-deprecating, sardonic, if politically astute author simultaneously trying to sell a doomed sitcom and breaking up his marriage, too. Not to mention T***p. The book is Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust. "A disturbing, funny, dark travelogue," writes Mark Maron, risking understatement.

February 14, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio: Poet, translator, editor and anthologist Boris Dralyuk. In his debut collection My Hollywood, Dralyuk researches, revives, revisits memory and imagination via lives and locales, legends and forgotten achievements of immigrant artists, poets, writers, and songwriters of a singular neighborhood. An homage by way of memoir and biography, and an artful celebration by an elegant, playful, smart, and funny writer in multiple forms. Dralyuk is an editor, anthologist, poet, and translator. He’s the former Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

February 7, 2023. This week's guest on Bibliocracy Radio is the author of a book on labor justice organizing by way of memoir, the natural world and radical history. Daisy Pitkin's gorgeous On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union is one of my recent favorite nonfiction reads, a poetic mix of documentary and imaginative writing built on discovery, insight, and struggle. It’s about working with industrial laundry workers in the American Southwest, about friendship, betrayal, and victory, too. Organized as a letter and a manifesto, a journal and a political analysis, it’s a book about changing lives, including both the writer’s and, perhaps even readers’ lives.

It’s the triumphant return of Bibliocracy Radio, 2 PM on Tuesday, January 31 on KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California. And now as a podcast. On our first show back, I host a favorite writer, Karen Joy Fowler. Her novel Booth is one of my recent favorites, an elegant and richly entertaining reimagining of the family and world and politics of the infamous Booth family. It's a revelatory dramatization of everyday 19th century America, the Civil War, theater, a rendering in details and atmosphere and scenes and history which brings all involved to life. Thanks for supporting Pacifica Radio KPFK 90.7 FM and my own commitment to celebrating the best in contemporary writing. You can listen live on the radio or stream online, or listen to the podcast.