Community of Writers Podcasts
Stay abreast of our summer workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction and Memoir by following to hear panels, and craft talks from esteemed agents and editors. Later in the year we will be adding selected craft talks from previous summers.
Year-round, we also host Bibliocracy Radio , a weekly half-hour books discussion and interview program hosted by Santa Monica Review editor Andrew Tonkovich featuring writers of literary fiction and nonfiction, poetry, memoir and cultural criticism.
Community of Writers Podcasts
Bibliocracy Episode 10: Venita Blackburn on Dead in Long Beach, Califonria
My guest this week is acclaimed short story writer and, now, novelist Venita Blackburn. Her debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California arrives after two acclaimed short story collections, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl. This new novel is a multi-form, multi-voiced chronicle of loss, self-discovery, of desperately sad if also playful strategies of identity and investigation. Its brilliant premise is matched by its engagement with language, much of it delivered via a collective consciousness which frames the storytelling, a formal device which makes such good sense because the protagonist is an author herself, of a dystopian graphic novel. Dead in Long Beach, California is also a story of a Black LA family and of life in Southern California. Venita Blackburn’s earlier work has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction and the New Yorker online. She is an associate professor in creative writing at Cal State Fresno and founder-president of Live, Write, an organization that offers free creative writing workshops for communities of color.
The views expressed in this program are those of its presenter and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the values of the Community of Writers or its Board of Directors.