Yaram Yahu is the author of My Afro is a Rising Sun, out with Running Press Kids, an imprint of Hachette, in 2024. He’s now working on several other picture books and a novel for adults and developing screenplays for television. In this episode, we discuss the importance of market research and the intricacies of the children’s picture book market, and he shares tested strategies for overcoming burnout as a full-time writer.

In this episode, we read one of our short stories, “Ten Years,” originally published in Modern Literature, a work of speculative fiction that examines the toll that societal pressures and generational trauma can take on the body and mind and asks what happens when your own country leaves you behind. We follow the reading with a discussion of these themes and share the story behind this story: how it came to be.

David Crespy is a playwright, biographer, and scholar. He’s the founder and co-director of Mizzou’s Writing for Performance Program, and he’s played an instrumental role in establishing and shaping the trajectories of many other programs, including the Missouri Playwright’s Workshop, the Mizzou New Play Series, and Summer Rep’s Comedy in Concert Series. His latest projects include a late-career biography of the playwright Edward F. Albee, whom he considered a colleague and friend. In this episode, he reads excerpts from two of his plays, shares insights gleaned from studying Albee’s legacy, and recounts the story of a little-known 18th-century Jewish heresiarch from Smyrna who rose to fame by claiming to be the Messiah.