Today we have poet Donika Kelly in the studio! We discuss drawing curtains and dressing chickens, growing up in Compton, the English teachers of Arkansas, and more.

"The novel covers the brief and tragic episode of their relationship, their hardscrabble existence and their attempt to start a family."

"I found inspiration for this book through my own process of sitting in spaces of ambivalence over the question of whether or not to mother."

"I found myself reflecting on the dilemma that artists who pen memoirs must face when writing explicitly about actual people whom they had sexual relations with."

"I love how the university's campus is integrated into downtown. When I noticed this during my orientation, it made everything so much more lively."

"I’ve been teaching a course called the Award-Winning Short Story, which is a workshop where we’ve been studying some of the guidelines of what might make a story stand out..."

"As editor, I gathered the stories from collections of Williams works at the University of Texas and Harvard University. The process of editing included sifting through Williams’s original notes and revisions to ascertain the most effective telling of each story."

"I am not a daily writer. I am a marathon writer. I prefer large, uninterrupted chunks of time to fully immerse myself and get into a flow."

Today we have Srikanth Reddy, poet and editor at the Paris Review, in the studio to discuss his early writing, his formative 3rd grade acrostic poem ABRAHAM LINCOLN, skipping school to review movies for the Chicago Tribune, deliberately losing a Spelling Bee, + more.

"I gave Cindy's eulogy—I was 18 years old—and the job never quite felt finished."