A People’s Guide to Orange County - Pt 1

Mary Camarillo on Those People Behind Us (Part 2)

Mary Camarillo on Those People Behind Us

Celebrating the ALA’s Banned Books Week with Deborah Caldwell-Stone. Part 2.

Celebrating the ALA’s Banned Books Week with Deborah Caldwell-Stone. Part 2.

Celebrating the ALA’s Banned Books Week with Deborah Caldwell-Stone.

Lisa Teasley on her new short story collection Fluid.

Rhoda Huffey reads from and talks about her newest novel, 31 Paradiso, out now in paperback

Rebroadcast of 2017 Bibliocracy Radio with Kathryn S. Olmsted on her Right Out of California.

August 8, 2023. Celebrating Al Young. Today I present the first in a Fund Drive series remembering Al Young, onetime poet laureate of California. The writer, poet, singer, teacher, musicologist and self-described bluesman passed away in 2021 but friends assembled this summer in Berkeley to remember him. Today’s edited highlights include a recording of Al himself, recollections from his son Michael Young, and music from the legendary jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Please support KPFK with a donation today.

August 8, 2023. Celebrating Al Young. Today I present the first in a Fund Drive series remembering Al Young, onetime poet laureate of California. The writer, poet, singer, teacher, musicologist and self-described bluesman passed away in 2021 but friends assembled this summer in Berkeley to remember him. Today’s edited highlights include a recording of Al himself, recollections from his son Michael Young, and music from the legendary jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Please support KPFK with a donation today.

August 8, 2023. Celebrating Al Young. Today I present the first in a Fund Drive series remembering Al Young, onetime poet laureate of California. The writer, poet, singer, teacher, musicologist and self-described bluesman passed away in 2021 but friends assembled this summer in Berkeley to remember him. Today’s edited highlights include a recording of Al himself, recollections from his son Michael Young, and music from the legendary jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Please support KPFK with a donation today.

May 23, 2023. This week, a special “performance edition” of the show in which I present readings by two contributors to the most recent issue of the West Coast journal I edit, the Santa Monica Review. The spring 2023 issue includes fiction and nonfiction, and I’ll play readings by the authors of two short stories taped recently at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation in Venice, CA. Gregory Tower and Kristen Leigh Schwarz are both heartbreakingly, sardonically, vividly smart and funny writers. Gregory Tower reads in full his “Riding in Cars with Joy,” a meaningfully wry adventure tale involving the real-life writer Joy Williams. Gregory Tower has worked as an LA bookseller and earned his MFA from UC Riverside Palm Desert. Then, an excerpt from “Breaking Ground” by Kristen Leigh Schwarz, about the 1994 Northridge earthquake, returning home, and abandoned love, with plenty of self-conscious if painful humor. Kristen Leigh Schwarz earned an MFA from UC Irvine with previous work in One Story, The American Literary Review and Collateral. Here she reads from the beginning of “Broken Ground.” Special thanks to Eric Ahlberg for recording. Copies of the latest issue of the Santa Monica Review are available at Southern California area bookstores or online at the SMR website

May 16, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio, I deliver a report from the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, where nearly 150,000 came out to hear readings, meet authors, attend panels and buy books. I spoke with representatives of four literary outfits I admire, and share my audio dispatch. My guests, in order of appearance: Steve Wasserman of the legendary Heyday Books, a nonprofit with a focus on West Coast writing approaching fifty years of education and activism. Beth Spotswood of the amazing Alta journal,committed to chronicling our state through prose, poetry, arts criticism, photography,and journalism. Next is Brittany Cain, from Indianapolis, Indiana where she works with the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. Finally, closer to home, I speak with Marco Beltran, of 826 LA, the tutoring center, time-travel themed bookstore and nonprofit community resource.

May 2, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio on KFPK 90.7 FM in Southern California, Part II with Jeff Dietrich on the 40th anniversary reprint edition of his landmark book of prison letters. 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 i, including a section early on in his incarceration, and also a kind of literary and spiritual and political origin story. 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 sincere and strong person of faith who challenged authority, took its punishment but ultimately, won.

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.