The Writing Table with Kris Clink

Nick Petrie's Latest Peter Ash Adventure: The Price You Pay

Nick Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington and won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. His story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. His first novel, The Drifter, won the ITW Thriller and Barry Awards, and was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Hammett Awards. He won the 2016 Literary Award from the Wisconsin Library Association and was named...

A.H. Kim & Relative Strangers

A.H. Kim (Ann) was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. Ann was educated at Harvard College and Berkeley Law School, where she was an editor of the California Law Review. Ann practiced corporate law for many years and served as chief of staff to the CEO and as head of investor relations at a Fortune 200 company. Ann is the proud mother of two sons, a longtime cancer survivor, and community volunteer. After raising her family in the Bay Area, Ann and her hus...

A.H. Kim

A.H. Kim (Ann) was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. Ann was educated at Harvard College and Berkeley Law School, where she was an editor of the California Law Review. Ann practiced corporate law for many years and served as chief of staff to the CEO and as head of investor relations at a Fortune 200 company. Ann is the proud mother of two sons, a longtime cancer survivor, and community volunteer. After raising her family in the Bay Area, Ann and her hus...

Heather Frese & The Saddest Girl on the Beach

Heather Frese is the author of the novel The Baddest Girl on the Planet, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize. She has published numerous short stories, essays, and the occasional poem. Her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review, Front Porch, the Barely South Review, Switchback, and elsewhere, earning notable mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Essays. Heather received her M.F.A. from West Virginia University and has a master’s degree from...

LR Jones & The Wedding Party

L. R. Jones is a pseudonym for New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Lisa Renee Jones, whose dark, edgy fiction includes the highly acclaimed novels The Poet, A Perfect Lie, and the Lilah Love series. Prior to publishing, Lisa owned a multistate staffing agency recognized by the Austin Business Journal. Lisa was listed as #7 in Entrepreneur magazine’s list of growing women-owned businesses. She lives in Colorado with her husband, a cat who always has something to say, and a golden ...

Parisa Akhbari & Just Another Epic Love Poem

Parisa Akhbari (@authorparisa) is a mental health therapist and writer from Seattle, Washington. Her debut YA novel, Just Another Epic Love Poem, follows two queer best friends in Catholic school as they fall in love through the pages of a never-ending poem they’ve been writing back and forth for five years. When not writing or therapizing, Parisa can be found trying to replicate her grandmother’s drool-worthy Persian recipes, riding ferries around the Puget Sound, and dancing around the kit...

Jeff Hoffmann: Like It Never Happened

Jeff quit a perfectly good job at the age of 47 to return to college for his MFA, and his first novel, Other People’s Children (Simon and Schuster, 2021), emerged from that silly decision. His second Novel, Like It Never Happened, will be released by Crooked Lane Books on March 5, 2024. In addition to his two novels, Jeff’s writing has been published in The Sun, Booth, Harpur Palate, and Publishers Weekly. He was the winner of the Madison Review’s Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and a final...

Jeff Hoffman: Like It Never Happened

Jeff quit a perfectly good job at the age of 47 to return to college for his MFA, and his first novel, Other People’s Children (Simon and Schuster, 2021), emerged from that silly decision. His second Novel, Like It Never Happened, will be released by Crooked Lane Books on March 5, 2024. In addition to his two novels, Jeff’s writing has been published in The Sun, Booth, Harpur Palate, and Publishers Weekly. He was the winner of the Madison Review’s Chris O’Malley Prize in Fiction and a final...

Andie Burke: Fly With Me

Andie Burke began college as an English major before jumping into a pediatric nursing career. Her writing is inspired by over a decade spent working in hospitals with patients of all ages. After the last couple years spent in the pandemic ER, she escaped to an outpatient pediatric sedation unit. Andie lives in a blue house in Maryland with an alarming number of books and an embarrassing number of ultra-fine point pens. When she’s not writing, she’s probably feeding snacks to the two small h...

Rebecca Hanover: The Last Applicant

Rebecca Hanover is the New York Times bestselling author of THE SIMILARS duology. After graduating from Stanford University with a BA in English and drama, Rebecca joined the writing team of the CBS daytime drama GUIDING LIGHT, where she earned an Emmy Award. Still, she never lost her love of books—particularly YA. She now writes Young Adult as well as adult novels full-time from her home in San Francisco, where she enjoys matcha lattes and a complete lack of seasons. When she isn’t writing,...

Sheila Athens: Neena Lee is Seeing Things

Sheila Athens writes smart fiction set where the South meets the Sunshine state. Her stories are about women seeking to find the peace we all deserve—whether they’re battling an external foe or an internal one (or both). Readers are drawn to her work because they believe that everyday heroes can make a difference in our world. After growing up in the Ozarks, she moved—sight unseen—to Northeast Florida with the man who would eventually become her husband. Thirty-five years later, she’s still...

Vanderbilts, Astors, & Pirates: Katherine Howe's Just Getting Started

Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian and novelist. She is the author of several novels for adults and young adults, has edited two volumes of primary sources for Penguin Classics, and is the co-author with Anderson Cooper of the #1 New York Times bestselling books VANDERBILT and ASTOR. Her newest novel, a mystery adventure set in the Golden Age of Piracy called A TRUE ACCOUNT: HANNAH MASURY'S SOJOURN AMONGST THE PYRATES, WRITTEN BY HERSELF came out in t...

Laurie Frankel: On Writing and Families

Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of four (going on five) novels. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, People Magazine, Lit Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and been optioned for film and TV. A former college professor, she now writes fu...

Laurie Frankel on Writing about Families

Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of four (going on five) novels. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, People Magazine, Lit Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and been optioned for film and TV. A former college professor, she now writes fu...

Sarahlyn Bruck's Trifecta: Soccer, Friendships, and Writing

Sarahlyn Bruck writes contemporary, book club fiction and is the award-winning author of three novels: Light of the Fire (coming January 2024), Daytime Drama (2021), and Designer You (2018). When she’s not writing, Sarahlyn moonlights as a full-time writing and literature professor at a local community college. She’s also a co-host of the pop culture podcast, Pretty Much Pop. From Northern California, she now lives in Philadelphia with her family. Learn more at sarahlynbruck.com and follow ...

Katrina Kittle: Morning in This Broken World

Katrina Kittle remembers thinking of herself as a writer way back in grade school, although she never thought about writing for publication until she graduated from college. Former classmates to this day tease her about the interminable stories she was always writing about horses or bands of stray animals. She inherited this love of books and storytelling from her dad, who encouraged her to read great books long before the same titles were required in school. Her dad still greets her at the ...

Peg Tyre: Crime Writing, Pulitzer Prizes, and Strangers in the Night

PEG TYRE, the bestselling author of The Trouble with Boys, was, until recently, a senior writer at Newsweek specializing in social trends and education. She has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Clarion Award, and a National Education Writers Association Award. She lives in New York City with her husband, novelist Peter Blauner, and their two sons.  Her acclaimed novel, Strangers in the Night, was recently rereleased twenty-seven years after its original publication.  Lear...

Erin Hoover: Poetry & No Spare People

Erin Hoover was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She is the author of two poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), which won the Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award, and No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading serie...

Gareth Russell's The Palace: 500 Years of British Monarchy

Gareth Russell is a historian and broadcaster, educated at Oxford University and Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of nine books. He is host of the podcast Single Malt History with Gareth Russell.  Russell divides his time between London and Belfast, Northern Ireland.  In THE PALACE, Russell presents 500 years of the British monarchy, from King Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth II, through a unique lens--their connections to specific rooms at Hampton Court Palace. Architecturally b...

Molly Harper: Witches Get Stuff Done

Molly Harper is the author of more than thirty paranormal and contemporary romance titles, including the Half-Moon Hollow series, the Southern Eclectic series, and the Audible exclusive Mystic Bayou series. Molly lives in Michigan with her family. Molly's latest novel is Witches Get Stuff Done, an Audible Original.  Learn more at mollyharper.com Intro reel, Writing Table Podcast 2024 Outro Recording

Jacqueline Mitchard: An Inconvenient Scandal

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the New York Times bestselling author of 23 novels for adults and teenagers, and the recipient of Great Britain’s Talkabout prize, The Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards, and named to the short list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, with more than 3 million copies in print in 34 languages. It was later adapted into a major feature film starring Michelle Pfeiffer....

Rochelle Weinstein's What You Do to Me

Rochelle B. Weinstein is the USA Today and Amazon bestselling author of When We Let Go, This Is Not How It Ends, Somebody’s Daughter, Where We Fall, The Mourning After, and What We Leave Behind. Rochelle spent her early years, always with a book in hand, raised by the likes of Sidney Sheldon and Judy Blume. A former entertainment industry executive, she splits her time between sunny South Florida and the mountains of North Carolina. When she’s not writing, Rochelle can be found on Miami's NB...

Vanessa Riley's Lady Worthing Mystery Series

Vanessa Riley is the award-winning author of Island Queen, a Good Morning America Buzz Pick. Riley's historical novels showcase the hidden histories of Black women and women of color, emphasizing strong sisterhoods and dazzling multicultural communities. Her works encompass historical fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery and have been reviewed by the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times. This Southern, Irish, Trini girl holds a ...

Emily Bleeker's When We Were Enemies

Emily Bleeker is the best-selling author of six novels. Combined, her books have reached over 1.5 million readers. She is a two-time Whitney Award finalist, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, Amazon charts bestseller and was recently listed as one of the top 100 Kindle authors “of all time.” Emily lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago with her four kids and a growing menagerie of animals. Between writing and being a mom, she attempts to learn guitar, sings along to the radio (loudly), perf...

Carolyn Hays & Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter

Carolyn Hays is an award-winning, critically acclaimed, bestselling author who has chosen to publish Letter to My Transgender Daughter under a pen name to protect the privacy of her family. Her novels have been published by Hachette, Simon and Schuster, and HarperCollins; her books are also widely translated. Letter to My Transgender Daughter has four overseas editions, including those by Picador UK and Flammarion in France. Her past books have been listed as New York Times Notable Books of ...

Yasmin Angoe: It Ends With Knight

Yasmin Angoe is the author of Her Name Is Knight and a first-generation Ghanaian American currently residing in South Carolina with her family. She’s served in education for nearly twenty years and works as a developmental editor. Yasmin received the 2020 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award from Sisters in Crime and is a member of numerous crime, mystery, and thriller organizations like Sisters in Crime, Crime Writers of Color, and International Thriller Writers.  Foll...

Alison Rose Greenberg: Maybe Once, Maybe Twice

Alison Greenberg is an author and screenwriter who lives in Atlanta, but is quick to say she was born in New York City. While attending The University of Southern California, Alison took her first screenwriting class and fell head over heels. A journey from screenwriting led to marketing jobs, before coming full-circle back to her first love. Alison speaks fluent rom-com, lives for 90’s WB dramas, cries to Taylor Swift, and is a proud single mom to her two incredible kids, two cats, and one ...

Emily Bleeker

David R. Slaton: Dark Moon Shallow Sea

David R. Slayton grew up in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where finding fantasy novels was pretty challenging and finding fantasy novels with diverse characters was downright impossible. Now he lives in Denver, Colorado and writes the books he always wanted to read. White Trash Warlock, David’s first novel, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2015, David founded Trick or Read, an annual initiative to give out books along with candy to children on Halloween as well as uplift lesser-known auth...

Virginia Pye: The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann

Virginia Pye’s collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, won the 2019 IPPY Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her novels, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, have also received literary awards. Her short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, (Press 53) won the 2019 Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Short Fiction, and one of its stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, New York Times, The Rumpus, Huffington Postand elsewhere. Virginia gradua...

Leah Redmond Chang: Young Queens

Leah Redmond Chang writes biography and literary non-fiction, with a focus on women’s history. Trained as a literature scholar, her books draw on her extensive research in the archives and in rare book libraries. A former tenured professor of French Literature and Culture at The George Washington University, she has also been an Honorary Senior Research Associate at University College London. She lives with her husband and three children in Washington DC, and spends as much time as possible ...

Christine Wells: The Royal Windsor Secret

Christine Wells writes historical fiction featuring strong, fascinating women. From early childhood, she drank in her father’s tales about the true stories behind popular nursery rhymes and she has been a keen student of history ever since. After graduating from university with a law degree, Christine worked in a large city firm, specializing in corporate mergers and acquisitions. She might still be a lawyer if she hadn’t accepted a challenge from her friend to try her hand at a novel. The m...

Janie Paul & Making Art in Prison

Janie Paul is a painter, curator, and writer. She is the senior curator and co-founder, with her late husband Buzz Alexander, of the Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons, a project of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP). She is Arthur F. Thurnau professor emerita at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan where she has won many awards for her art and social justice work with incarcerated people and children experiencing poverty. She lives in Ann Arbor, Mich...

Erin Baker's My Little Nail Salon

Entrepreneur and fitness guru Erin Baker was inspired by a mid-pandemic conversation with her mother-in-law about Baker’s daughter, Arden’s fascination with nail polish. Without delay, this busy mom went to work, not stopping until she’d created a product that could be shared with other young people, My Little Nail Salon.  Learn more at;  www.mylittlenailsalon.com  Intro reel, Writing Table Podcast 2024 Outro Recording

Sierra Godfrey: The Second Chance Hotel

Sierra Godfrey is the author of A Very Typical Family and The Second Chance Hotel (Sourcebooks). She was born in Santa Cruz, California and has lived many places, including Santorini, Greece. She loves hiking, watching soothing British farmland shows, and thinking of stories about messy families. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family, which includes a dog, two cats, and a turtle, all of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Email: [email protected] Twitter: ht...

Carol Dunbar: Writing off the Grid

Carol Dunbar has been writing books since kindergarten and worked freelance as a ghostwriter on her path to becoming a novelist. In 2018 she won the Hal Prize for fiction and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, The South Carolina Review, Midwest Review, and others. Her essays about living off the grid can be heard on Wisconsin Public Radio; one essay, involving her encounter with a mother bear, was televised as an animated short. Before devoting herself to writing, Carol earned ...

End of Summer Bonus Replay

This episode features clips from recent interviews with:  Philippa Gregory Meredith Ireland Anthony Tchaikovsky Gin Phillips Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop Namrata Patel Hannah Dolby Piper Hugely CeCe Lyra, Literary Agent Steve Phillips Ciera Horton McElroy Ashley Winstead Sariah Wilson Ret'd. Captain Brett Crozier Amina Aktar Kelly J. Ford Kelly Farmer Allison Winn Scotch Intro reel, Writing Table Podcast 2024 Outro Recording

Summer Message from Kris

The Writing Table is taking some time off in August, but Kris and her team will be back in September with more fascinating conversations with authors and publishing pros. Until then, wishing you and yours the safest, kindest, and happiest summer adventures.  Intro reel, Writing Table Podcast 2024 Outro Recording

Lindsay Cameron & No One Needs to Know

Lindsay Cameron worked as a corporate lawyer for many years in Vancouver and New York City before leaving the law behind to write books. Her debut, Biglaw, was optioned for film by Paramount and named a best book of the year by Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and Harper's Bazaar, among others. Her suspense debut, Just One Look, was published in 2021 and the New York Times called it "delicious and marvelously controlled...a wild ride of a novel" and "one of the most viscerally accurate renderings...

Kelly J. Ford: Behind The Hunt

Kelly J. Ford is the author of the crime novels, Real Bad Things and Cottonmouths, which has “impressive depths of character and setting,” according to the Los Angeles Review, which named it one of its Best Books of 2017. An Arkansas native, Kelly writes crime fiction set in the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley. She currently lives on Cape Cod. Learn more about Kelly here:  Website: https://kellyjford.com/ Instagram: @kellyjfordauthor                     Twitter: @Kelly_J_Ford Intro ree...

Annie Rains on Writing Romance and Women's Fiction

USA Today bestselling author Annie Rains lives in a small, coastal North Carolina town, full of lovable folks, scenic downtown areas, and breathtaking nature—similar to the towns she writes about in her books. Annie’s love of reading and writing grabbed hold of her at a young age and never let go. Her first book was published in 2015, and she’s been writing heartfelt, page-turning stories ever since. When Annie isn’t writing, she’s reading from her never-ending TBR stack on her bedside table...

Donna Hill: Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing

Donna Hill began her career in 1987 writing short stories for the confession magazines. Since that time she has more than 100 published titles to her credit since her first novel was released in 1990, and is considered one of the early pioneers of the African American romance genre.  Three of her novels Intimate Betrayal, Masquerade and A Private Affair have been adapted for television. The only Arabesque /BET Books author that can claim that distinction. She has been featured in Essence, th...

Bryn Turnbull: The Paris Deception

When she was eleven years old, Bryn Turnbull accidentally put her foot through a single-pane window while leafing through a well-worn copy of Sandman (Volume 2). The incident, which resulted in a trip to the hospital, five stitches, and a unique application of superglue, taught her two things: one, that reading is not, and should not be attempted as, a full-contact sport; and two, that writers can create worlds within a book so absorbing, so completely and utterly all-encompassing, that they...

Namrata Patel & Scent Of a Garden

Namrata Patel is an Indian-American author who lives in Boston. Her writing examines diaspora, dual-cultural identity among Indian-Americans and explores this dynamic while also touching on both—the family’s we’re born with and those we choose. Namrata has lived in India, Spokane, London, and New York City. Namrata has been writing for most of her adult life and loves creating characters who are relatable and aspirational. Her heroines range from quiet to kick-ass and her heroes are swoon-wo...

Hannah Dolby: No Life for a Lady

Hannah Dolby’s first job was in the circus and she has aimed to keep life as interesting since. She trained as a journalist in Hastings and has worked in PR for many years, promoting museums, galleries, palaces, gardens and even Dolly the sheep.    She completed the Curtis Brown selective three-month novel writing course, and she won runner-up in the Comedy Women in Print Awards for this novel with the prize of a place on an MA in Comedy Writing at the University of Falmouth.    She lives in...

Fantasy Writer Adrian Tchaikovsky

ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY was born in Lincolnshire and studied zoology and psychology at Reading, before practising law in Leeds. He is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor and is trained in stage-fighting. His literary influences include Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville, Mary Gently, Steven Erikson, Naomi Novak, Scott Lynch and Alan Campbell. Learn more at: adriantchaikovsky.com Intro reel, Writing Table Podcast 2024 Outro Recording

Literary Agent CeCe Lyra: Querying, R&Rs, & What No One Tells Writers

Cecilia “CeCe” Lyra is a literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency representing adult fiction and non-fiction. She is drawn to books with strong hooks and smooth writing, told with originality, nuance, and authenticity. A long-term strategic thinker, CeCe prioritizes the creative reach and sustainable longevity of her authors’ careers, and she is especially looking for clients with whom she can build fruitful, lasting relationships. Both a storyteller and a storyseller, CeCe believes that stori...

Surf When You Can: Retired Navy Captain Brett Crosier

Brett Crozier grew up in California, graduated from the United States Naval Academy, and embarked on a thirty-year career in the Navy, flying dozens of combat missions over Iraq and leading at the highest levels of operational command. He served as the commanding officer of a combat F/A-18 strike fighter squadron, the world’s largest and most advanced communications ship, and ultimately the USS Theodore Roosevelt before retiring from the Navy in 2022. Surf When You Can is his first book. Ple...

Surf When You Can: Retired Navy Captain Brett Crozier

Brett Crozier grew up in California, graduated from the United States Naval Academy, and embarked on a thirty-year career in the Navy, flying dozens of combat missions over Iraq and leading at the highest levels of operational command. He served as the commanding officer of a combat F/A-18 strike fighter squadron, the world’s largest and most advanced communications ship, and ultimately the USS Theodore Roosevelt before retiring from the Navy in 2022. Surf When You Can is his first book. Ple...

Ashley Winstead & Fool Me Once

Ashley Winstead’s 2021 breakout thriller, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, was an Amazon Editor’s Best Thriller, an Apple Books Best Book of August, as well as a Library Journal, New York Times, CrimeReads, Parade, and Goodreads best or most anticipated thriller of the year.  Her 2022 thriller, The Last Housewife, was a Library Reads pick, a Loan Star pick, an Amazon Editor’s Best Thriller, as well as a Cosmopolitan, Good Morning America, Good Housekeeping, Seattle Times, and Southern Review of...