Ira Jeffrey Glass is an American public radio personality. He is the host and producer of the radio and television series This American Life and has participated in other NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. His work in radio and television has won him awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Radio and the George Polk Award in Radio Reporting.
Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.
A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing. Podcasts are primarily an audio medium, with some programs offering a supplemental video component. Streaming applications and podcasting services provide a convenient and integrated way to manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices. There are also podcast search engines, which help users find and share podcast episodes.
Charlie Jane Anders is an American writer and commentator. She has written several novels as well as shorter fiction, published magazines and websites, and hosted podcasts. In 2005, she received the Lambda Literary Award for work in the transgender category, and in 2009, the Emperor Norton Award. Her 2011 novelette Six Months, Three Days won the 2012 Hugo and was a finalist for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky was listed No. 5 on Time magazine's "Top 10 Novels" of 2016, won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2017 Crawford Award, and the 2017 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel; it was also a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Matt Haig is an English author and journalist. He has written both fiction and non-fiction books for children and adults, often in the speculative fiction genre.
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a fantasy role-playing game first published in 1974. As the popularity of the game grew throughout the late-1970s and 1980s, it became referenced in popular culture more frequently. The complement of games, films and cultural references based on Dungeons & Dragons or similar fantasies, characters, and adventures became ubiquitous after the end of the 1970s.
Kevin Sampsell is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. He has worked at Powell's Book Store since 1998 as an events coordinator and the head of the small press section. His memoir, A Common Pornography, was published by Harper Perennial in January 2010. Tin House published his novel, This Is Between Us (2013), about a man and woman, both divorced, trying to start a life together. His collection of collage art and poems, I Made an Accident, will be published by Clash Books in summer of 2022. Sampsell also started and co-produced Lit Hop, a one-night, multiple-venue reading event in Portland, Oregon. It happened from 2013 to 2016. He curates and hosts another event promoting small publishers and small press writers, Smallpressapalooza, every March at Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon.
Adelle Waldman is an American novelist, columnist and blogger. Her first novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was published in 2013.
Serial is an investigative journalism podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig, narrating a nonfiction story over multiple episodes. The series was co-created and is co-produced by Koenig and Julie Snyder and developed by This American Life; as of July 2020, it is owned by The New York Times.
Mark Russell is an American author, cartoonist, and comic book writer.
Gimlet Media LLC was a digital media company and podcast network, focused on producing narrative podcasts and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. The company was founded in 2014 by Alex Blumberg and Matthew Lieber, who serve as the company's CEO and president respectively until Lieber stepped down in 2022. In February 2019, Spotify announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Gimlet for $230 million. In 2023, Spotify merged Gimlet into Spotify Studios.
Lidia Yuknavitch is an American writer, teacher and editor based in Oregon. She is the author of the memoir The Chronology of Water, and the novels The Small Backs of Children,Dora: A Headcase, and The Book of Joan. She is also known for her TED talk "The Beauty of Being a Misfit", which has been viewed over 3.2 million times, and her follow-up book The Misfit's Manifesto.
Literary Hub is a daily literary website that launched in 2015 by Grove Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin, American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame editor Terry McDonell, and Electric Literature founder Andy Hunter.
The Story Collider is a US-based non-profit group dedicated to telling true, personal stories about science. Their mission is to empower both scientists and nonscientists alike with the skills they need to tell these stories and share them through their live shows and podcast, with the goal of exploring the human side of science.
Night Vale Presents, formerly known as Commonplace Books, is a production company and independent podcast network founded in 2015 by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. In 2016 Night Vale Presents expanded into a network hosting original podcasts other than Welcome to Night Vale. Night Vale Presents is partnered with Public Radio Exchange.
The Red Jacket Jamboree is a throw back radio variety show which is offered to American public radio networks through PRX Radio Exchange. Hosted by Lena Dorey and Martin Achatz, two-time Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula, the show shares stories, music, history and comedy that revolves around life in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, especially that of the Keweenaw Peninsula, also known as Michigan's Copper Country. The show is recorded in front of a live audience at venues within the Keweenaw Peninsula for later radio broadcast. The show is named after Red Jacket, the original name for the village of Calumet, Michigan, where the show is headquartered.
Darknet Diaries is an investigative podcast created by Jack Rhysider, chronicling true stories about crackers, malware, botnets, cryptography, cryptocurrency, cybercrime, and Internet privacy, all subjects falling under the umbrella of "tales from the dark side of the Internet".
Storybound is a podcast created, produced, and hosted by Jude Brewer, with original music composed for each episode. The show is a collaboration between Lit Hub and The Podglomerate podcast network, featuring household names and Pulitzer Prize winning authors alongside relatively unknown bands, singer-songwriters, and composers. Season 1 debuted on December 3, 2019. Inspired from Brewer's Storytellers Telling Stories, Storybound surpassed a million downloads in its first year, following up with seasons 2 and 3, the latter of which has been recognized for experimental cross-genre music compositions with sampling created and arranged by Brewer.
Jude Brewer is an American writer, producer, actor, and podcast host, best known for creating and hosting Storybound and Storytellers Telling Stories. Brewer's writing has appeared internationally through literary magazines, and most recently in podcasts and short films.
Meditative Story is a podcast that combines first-person stories with meditation prompts and original music, to create a mindfulness experience in audio. Variety describes Meditative Story as “part first-person narrative podcast and part guided meditation.” The podcast is hosted by Rohan Gunatillake and has featured stories from Krista Tippett, NPR Host Peter Sagal, travel writer Pico Iyer, restaurateur Danny Meyer, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, author A.J. Jacobs, Beautycon Media's Moj Mahdara, actor Josh Radnor, actor Catherine Reitman, NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller and MOMA curator Paola Antonelli, among others.
