FEATURED GUESTS
Mallory Noe-Payne is a radio journalist based in Richmond. She's covered policy and politics from the state capital for Virginia’s NPR stations since 2016. She was a 2020-2021 recipient of the Fulbright Young Journalist Award. She spent a year in Munich, Germany researching memory, justice, and how a society can collectively confront its sins, then creating the acclaimed podcast Memory Wars. Her Virginia-based coverage of home healthcare workers, voting rights, and Richmond’s Slave Trail have all won national news awards.
Susannah Nevison is the author of the poetry collections Lethal Theater (Ohio State University, 2019), winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Teratology (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. With Molly McCully Brown, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020), which was recently selected by the NEA as a 2025-2026 “Big Read” book. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Virginia with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.
Tara Burke
Tara Shea Burke is a writer and artist from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She teaches undergraduate writing and critical thinking at VCU, and poetic craft at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Her poetry and essays have recently been published in Screen Door Review, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Khôra, and several anthologies. She’s interested in art and craft that both bows to and blurs the lines between genre and discipline, memory and history, story, form and constraint, and how the body moves and makes.
Michael Paul Williams is a journalist and a regular columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Williams joined the Times-Dispatch in 1982 and became a columnist for the paper in 1992, becoming the first African American to hold this position. In 2021 Williams won a Pulitzer prize for his commentary pieces published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s story of Amelia Earhart's marriage, The Aviator and The Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, will be published Summer 2025 by Viking. She is a documentary director who has received an Independent Spirit Award for directing, and an Emmy nomination, She is an Adjunct Professor of journalism at NYU for their graduate program, and the 2022 winner of the Silurian Press‘s People Profile award for her New York Times profile on living WW2 pilot Si Spiegel.
Kalela Williams is an author, a proud auntie, a cat mama, and history enthusiast. She is the director of Virginia Humanities' Virginia Center for the Book, and she has held leadership positions at Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia youth organization; the Free Library of Philadelphia and Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. Kalela's writing has appeared in numerous literary magazines, and her historical interpretation and writing have been commissioned by historic sites and archives, as well as artistic and cultural organizations. Kalela grew up in Atlanta, but now she calls Staunton, Virginia home, where she works with her partner's organization, The Off Center, and shepherds their three cats. Tangleroot is her debut novel.
Davey White is a writer and theater maker whose most recent credits include The Ramayana, which was performed in both Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with Ego Po Classic Theater, Paper Moon Puppet Theater, and Kalanari Theater Movement; as well as his original play Gintry with Troy Foundry Theater and Die-Cast Theater in Troy, New York. Closer to home, he has recently directed and performed in original puppetry-based works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Staunton, Virginia's Mischief & Magic Festival, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He is the founder and director of a theatrical and literary organization,The Off Center.