Podcast

The Skylight Books Podcast features exciting author conversations about new fiction, poetry, essays, and more! You can subscribe for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean. And you can shop for featured podcast titles below. Happy listening!

Skylit: Sandra Cisneros, ”WOMAN WITHOUT SHAME” w/ Elisa Garcia

It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.

Join us for a wonderful conversation about womanhood, writing, and defying patriarchal expectations between Cisneros and Skylight's own Elisa Garcia.

SKYLIT: Meghan Gilliss, ”LUNGFISH” w/ Kendall Storey

Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives—or before they are found out.

Relying on the island for sustenance and answers—bladderwrack, rosehips, tenacious little green crabs; smells held by the damp walls of the house, field guides and religious texts, a failed invention left behind by her missing father—Tuck lives moment-by-moment through the absurdity, beauty, paranoia, and hunger that shoots through her life, as her husband struggles to detox.

Exquisitely written and formally daring, Lungfish tells the story of a woman grappling through the lies she has been told—and those she has told herself—to arrive at the truth of who she is and where she must go. Meghan Gilliss’s debut is a brilliant and heartbreaking novel about addiction, doubt, marriage, motherhood, and learning to see in the dark.

Join us for a conversation between Gilliss and Kendall Storey.

SKYLIT: Ramzi Fawaz, ”QUEER FORMS” w/ Ryan Hatch

In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women's and gay liberation--including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet--were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called "normal" gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments--from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth--and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind's eye and interpreted by diverse publics.

Join us for a conversation between Fawaz and Ryan Hatch.

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