Wednesday, January 30 - Mariah K. Young

Tonight at 8 PM on Bibliocracy Radio, on KPFK 90.7 FM.  MARIAH K. YOUNG. I’ve read in articles and reviews of tonight’s guest - a debut writer - that she began writing her collection of short stories as investigative journalism, perhaps accounting for their integrity, and honest portrayal of lives found in the shadows, missed by plenty of journalists and even creative writers.  Born in San Leandro, Mariah K. Young lived and watched and wrote in East Oakland, where the characters of the nine stories in Masha’allah and Other Stories also live and work.  This excellent collection won the inaugural James D. Houston Award sponsored by the good folks at Heyday, and includes an epigraph from Khalil Gibran, ironic and striving and brave: “Work is love made visible.” The environs of the Bay Area’s most ignored and abused are illuminated in Young’s careful attention to the stark poetry of too little good work and the struggle for love, and for justice.  A family raising fighting dogs, a failed pot grower, a bar maid, a cab driver, a  hair stylist who sees her clients in the houses that she also cleans, these are voices we ignore at our peril, with the chance to catch up, here, right now, in this collection.  For more on Heyday and Mariah K. Young:  https://heydaybooks.com/mariah-k-young-first-winner-of-the-james-d-houston-award/

Thanks for listening on the radio, online, or as a free download.  Friend me on Facebook, where I also share the program file.    

Wednesday, January 23 - Moving Waters, Racelle Rosett

Wednesday night at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM:  RACELLE ROSETT.  Note to self:  People are, happily, so much more than they seem, so much more than we are often asked to understand them as by too-easy stereotype or one-dimensional sketches drawn by popular culture.  When revealed in the gesture of embracing ritual, the characters who inhabit writer Racelle Rosett’s new fiction collection immediately confront complication, contradiction and the beautiful pain of wisdom.   A rabbi who plays a rabbi on television, an actress who finds a way to leave her husband, an old woman attempting to reconcile with her children.  Each of the characters in eighteen beautiful short stories which make up Moving Waters attends a Reform temple in Hollywood but, more than that, attends to a tradition demanding intellectual and emotional curiosity, bravery and honesty.  You’ll recognize the place, and be happy to meet characters in a book which collects award-winning and new short stories from a television writer (her day job) who won the Moment Magazine –Karma Foundation Prize for Jewish short fiction and the Lilith Fiction Prize.  Friends, this is one jewel of a book.  Listen on the radio, online, or as a download.  Buy a copy.  I promise you won’t be disappointed.  Check out my recent review at OC Bookly http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2012/10/racelle_rosett.php, 

if you need more persuasion.  And Rosett's website: 
http://www.racellerosett.com/.
Thanks for listening, and for supporting people-powered radio in Southern California.

Wednesday, January 16 - Jon Wiener

Wednesday night at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM:  JON WIENER.  Yes, broadcasting tonight from the Center for the Study of Cool Progressive Historians, my guest is the host of KPFK’s own terrific Wednesday afternoon public affairs and political and cultural analysis hour, “The Four O’Clock Report.”  Professor Jon Wiener is also, of course, a professor of History at UC Irvine, contributor to The Nation and other magazines and newspapers, a celebrated historian-activist famous for his work at annoying the FBI into releasing the records on their harassment of John Lennon, and the author or editor of previous books including Gimme Some Truth, Historians in Trouble and Conspiracy in the Streets.  I could go on, but you might just visit his website:  http://jonwiener.com/.  Jon Wiener has now written another popular history book with, of course, a sense of purpose and sense of humor, this one called, provocatively, How We Forgot the Cold War:  A Historical Journey Across America. Wiener is one of my favorite writers, not to mention a favorite voice on our (!) community radio station.  Thanks for listening to Bibliocracy on the radio, online or as a download free for 90 days from the audio archives.

Wednesday, January 9 - Young Adult Political Novelist Patricia Dunn

Wednesday night at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM:  PATRICIA DUNN.  How to take politics seriously, sincerely, and not talk down to kids, and best of all to create a worldview and a daily life where grown-ups know what is going on in the world, are engaged, take positions, embrace conflict, make mistakes but have the courage to act?  For my guest this week, Young Adult author Patricia Dunn, the way is to immerse her protagonist and the reader in the crises and challenges of our moment, with empathy, humor and a fast plot line moving to match the speed, in this case, of the Egyptian uprising.  In her Young Adult novel for all ages, Rebels by Accident, Dunn introduces a young girl whose ambivalence about her family’s cultural and religious traditions takes a dramatic turn when she’s sent to live with her grandmother, a strong and beautiful woman who sometimes gently, sometimes dramatically, challenges everything young Marian imagines.  Patricia Dunn is a former community activist and longtime friend of KPFK, where she once worked! She was managing editor of Muslimwakeup, an online journal, and her work as appeared in Global City Review, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Nation.  Thanks for listening, on the radio or online, or as a download free from the station’s archives for 90 days.  Find an audio file on my Facebook page, too, where you might like to be my friend.