Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Who should science serve? 

On Writer’s Voice, I talk with Annalee Newitz about A Wall Is Also a Road,
 a science fiction novel about an alien graduate student who comes to Earth looking for evidence of life. A relationship with a woman in Pompeii forces them to ask what a researcher owes the people they study. We talk about care and consent, who funds science, and who benefits from it. 

“And I think that’s increasingly something that people...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What happens when the person you love doesn’t exist?

This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with Carlos Barragán about The Yahoo Boys, his investigation into Nigeria’s romance scammers, which began with his own mother’s experience.

“Sometimes behind a perpetrator is another victim.” – Carlos Barragán

Then,  Howard Mansfield joins us to discuss Invisible Monuments, exploring why some memorials move us, why others don’t, and how we remember the past.

“It’s a back and forth b...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What survives when a community is destroyed?

We talk with Ray Nayler about his new novel, Palaces of the Crow, in which four young people survive World War II in a Lithuanian forest with help from extraordinarily intelligent crows.

We explore how his years in Central Asia and the Balkans shaped the book, and why he turned to the Eastern Front to examine questions that still confront us.

What happens when trauma becomes revenge? How do we preserve a co...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What happens when tech workers challenge the companies they once believed in?

This week Writer’s Voice talks with Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan about Against Tech Oligarchy. They helped build the tech worker movement, and they’re candid about both its victories and the limits of its organizing strategies. We talk about Google’s Project Maven, the Kickstarter union drive, and why winning union recognition doesn’t automatically give workers the leverage they need.

“The only way to hold our bosses and o...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What do we learn to live with, and when do we decide we can’t accept it anymore?

This week, we talk with Tom Lin about his novel, Babylon, South Dakota. It follows a Chinese immigrant family whose new home shares its landscape with a nuclear missile silo. We talk about magical realism, family stories, belonging, dementia, and the relationship between science fiction and the weapons people build.

I think the power of magical realism is to introduce amazing things which are...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What happens when the old rules stop working?

This week, two works of fiction look at the relationships that shape us, and the systems of power we often carry within ourselves.

First, Malavika Kannan talks about Unprecedented Times, her coming-of-age novel about Rishi, a queer Indian American student whose arrival at Stanford coincides with a crisis of faith in activism, institutions and the American promise itself.

As 2020 transforms the world around her, Rishi wrestles with family expectations, friendship, sex, co...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

When the state comes for your neighbors, what can you do?

In Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, journalist Sonali Kolhatkar looks at communities that aren’t waiting for someone else to answer that question.

“Nobody is coming to save us from this machinery. We have to do it ourselves.” — Sonali Kolhatkar

Kolhatkar tells us about ordinary people who have organized patrols to document ICE operations, created rapid-response networks, warned vulnerable neighbors and provided food, rent money...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

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James Baldwin believed that love could be terrifying, but also our only hope. For Keith Haring, hope lay in art.

This week, I talk with Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of James Baldwin told through four relationships that shaped Baldwi...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Extraction Built Our World. Now Comes the Reckoning.

What do we do when the systems that created modern prosperity begin to undermine the conditions for life itself?

I talk with James Crawford about The Vanishing Earth: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Extraction. Crawford grew up in a family shaped by coal, copper and North Sea oil. Now he’s asking what that history means in a world where extraction reaches into virtually everything we do.

We talk about lithium mini...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

There comes a moment in many families when the people who once took care of us begin to need our care.

This week on Writer’s Voice, two writers explore that profound reversal, and the practical, emotional and even spiritual challenges it brings.

First, personal finance journalist Beth Pinsker talks about My Mother’s Money. When her fiercely independent mother became ill, Pinsker suddenly found herself managing everything from bank accounts and bills to the staggering costs of long-term care. And despit...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

American fascism didn’t begin with Donald Trump, or even with the rise of fascism in Europe. Its roots reach deep into our own history.

America’s road to fascism began with a big lie about who counts as fully human. That’s what historian Joseph Kelly reveals in his book, The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818–1915. Kelly traces a long struggle between two visions of the country. One rests on the Declaration’s promise of equality. The other claims that people aren’...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

A machine that never judges us may also teach us to forget how human relationships work.

Writer’s Voice talks with Victoria Hetherington about The Friend Machine, her investigation into people who seek friendship, therapy and love from AI. We explore loneliness, simulated care, privacy, emotional dependence and the extraordinary power of the corporations building these systems.

“That’s probably my primary concern, that moral de-skilling might occur.” — Victoria Hetherington

Then, we revisit our 2025 conversation with Silvia Park about her sci-fi n...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What does it take to win back a democracy, and who is our government really supposed to serve?

This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with anthropologist Ida Susser about her book, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy. She tells the story of a movement in France that began with anger over a diesel tax and grew into a much deeper defense of public services, economic dignity, and democratic power.

“There is no other thing to do for democr...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Can science fiction help us imagine a way through climate crisis, runaway corporate power, and the rise of AI?

This week, we talk with John Feffer about Songlands and Portia Elan about Homebound, two speculative novels that ask how we can make a livable future in an age of crisis.

Songlands, the final novel in Feffer’s Splinterlands trilogy, takes us into a climate-ravaged world where nations have fractured and a biotech corporation holds enormous power. Yet poetry, collective action, and a co...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

The Cuban Revolution transformed a nation. It also ended the Mob’s dream of turning Havana into the center of a global criminal empire. And it divided families.

Writer’s Voice talks with Cuban American historian Ada Ferrer about her memoir, Keeper of My Kin. When Ferrer was ten months old, her mother carried her out of Cuba without saying goodbye to Ferrer’s nine-year-old half-brother, Poli. The separation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted seventeen years.

“We tend to think that...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Economic insecurity is reshaping America’s workforce. Will that bring college-educated and non-college educated workers together?

For decades, Americans were told that education was the pathway to the middle class. Get a degree, work hard, and professional success would follow. But that promise has weakened.

In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber argues that millions of college graduates increasingly face the same insecurity that has long confronted blue-collar workers. They carry heav...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

What does courage demand when freedom is threatened?

This week on Writer’s Voice, two conversations ask one of the hardest questions any of us can face. What does it really mean to resist?

First, journalist Gal Beckerman joins Writer’s Voice to talk about his book How to Be a Dissident. Drawing on figures from Hannah Arendt to Alexei Navalny, Osip Mandelstam and Etty Hillesum, he argues that dissidents aren’t superheroes. They’re ordinary people who decide they can no longer...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Patriotism demands more than pride, it demands moral courage.

This Independence Day episode of Writer’s Voice explores two remarkable women who believed loving America meant challenging it to live up to its highest ideals.

First, filmmaker, author and activist John de Graaf discusses From Sea to Shining Sea, his documentary about Katharine Lee Bates, author of America the Beautiful. Far from writing a triumphal anthem, Bates created what de Graaf calls a patriotic prayer, a vision of a nation grounded in j...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Who gets to tell the story, and who gets erased?

This week on Writer’s Voice, we talk with media scholar Robin Andersen about her book The Complicit Lens: U.S. Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s argument is blunt: the American press didn’t just fail to report accurately on Gaza. Through what she calls “the complicit lens,” it helped make the genocide possible.

“It’s no small charge to say that establishment media is complicit in a genocide. And...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

The stories we tell can change how we live.

This week on Writer’s Voice, a novel about what happens when we lose our connection to the living systems that sustain us.

Songwriter and author Alex Woodard joins us to talk about Ordinary Soil, a multigenerational saga of a Choctaw farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle that traces the intertwined health of land, food, and people across more than a century.

“The simplified message of this book is that you ge...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Anand Gopal on Syria’s Lost Democratic Revolution

What really happened in Syria?

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we talk with journalist Anand Gopal about his extraordinary book Days of Love and Rage. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Gopal reconstructs the story of ordinary Syrians who rose up against dictatorship and attempted to build a democratic society in the city of Manbij during the Arab Spring.

“In these complex scenarios, you usually hear about de...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

Episode Summary

What if the story we tell about civilization is wrong?

What if human history isn’t a steady march from “primitive” hunter-gatherers to ever more advanced societies, but something far messier, more inventive, and more fragile — a long experiment of adaptation, collapse, reinvention, and survival?

Our guest, historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman takes readers deep into that story in his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World.

“Our human past is infi...

Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, Francesca speaks with Omar Zahzah, Palestinian-American scholar, activist, journalist, and author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.

“There’s never been a moment in time where Palestinians did not resist their dispossession. And consequently, there is not going to be a moment in time where Palestinians begin to cease resisting.”

Zahzah offers the first book-length analysis of how major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram...