My guest today is Ada Limón. She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Things and The Carrying and her new book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.

She’s written with inspiring honesty about the death of loved ones, trying to conceive and also the unexpected liberation of deciding to step away from societal expectations of motherhood and embrace a life happily childfree. Her latest book on craft, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, asks how a poem can hold our heaviest grief without letting the human spirit fracture.

After years living in Kentucky and New York, she bought back her childhood home in Sonoma Valley, stepping back into the rooms where her poetic imagination first took root. We’ll talk about the discipline of paying attention and why poetry remains an essential act of human survival.

(1:45) Silence as the Music of the World

(9:17) The Deepening of Roots

(13:19) 'On Earth As It Is on Earth'

(18:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief

(21:02) Singing Back the Wounded World and the Case for Beauty

(28:22) Love as an Active Daily Choice

(30:38) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation

(37:34) Writing Without Music, Listening to the Landscape

(40:04) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness

(42:51) The Creative Toll of AI

(51:29) Embracing the Liberation of a Childfree Life

(1:01:06) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity

(1:06:44) Interconnectedness of Living Beings

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“It’s always very interesting that we have to make a case for art because we don’t have to make a case for fast food. Like, we don’t have to make a case for all of these sort of things in our lives that we do not need, and yet we have to make a case for beauty? We have to make a case for the soul? We have to make a case for humanity? We have to make a case for singing back the wounded world? That to me is fascinating”

My guest today is Ada Limón. She served two historic terms as the 24th poet laureate in the United States. She has brought poetry to public parks across the US, and her words have traveled through deep space, engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. In over 20 years of writing in celebrated collections like Bright Dead Thingsand The Carryingand her new book, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada has brought a sincerity to American poetry rooted in connection to the natural world.

She’s written with inspiring honesty about the death of loved ones, trying to conceive and also the unexpected liberation of deciding to step away from societal expectations of motherhood and embrace a life happily childfree. Her latest book on craft, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, asks how a poem can hold our heaviest grief without letting the human spirit fracture.

After years living in Kentucky and New York, she bought back her childhood home in Sonoma Valley, stepping back into the rooms where her poetic imagination first took root. We’ll talk about the discipline of paying attention and why poetry remains an essential act of human survival.

(0:03) The Case for Beauty  

(0:39) About Ada Limón

(2:44) The Deepening of Roots

(5:01) Reading 'On Earth As It Is on Earth'

(6:08) Bearing Witness Without Surrendering to Grief

(7:50) The Definition of Beauty and the Dissolving Self

(9:41) Love as an Active Daily Choice

(11:11) The Practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation

(13:28) Reading 'Hell or High Water'

(17:01) Writing Without Music and Listening to the Landscape

(19:08) Dreams as Archetypes of Consciousness

(21:34) The Environmental and Creative Toll of Generative AI

(24:02) AI and the Future of the Arts

(25:21) Stewardship, Conservation, and Faith in the Invisible Workers

(28:14) The Childfree Daughter

(29:57) Listening to Trees as an Act of Reciprocity

(32:40) The Music of the World

(34:03) The Seed of Interconnectedness

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“Lincoln Center is multiple stages. I think probably over three dozen stages across 16 acres. It is a vast canvas in and of itself. And then we have this beautiful plaza that leads to this beautiful campus, and that’s the visual I think that most people have when they think of Lincoln Center is this beautiful fountain in the center and these three gorgeous buildings.It’s New York’s biggest plaza, and it feels very vibrant and beautiful. In the summer, we really take that plaza and we transform it into a dance floor. So this idea of also interrupting what people’s notion of Lincoln Center is because it’s a space that is very aspirational, which is a great thing.”

Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent nineteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.

(0:00) Reimagining Lincoln Center

(2:27) Art and the Human Experience

(4:40) The Curiosity of Childhood

(5:44) Alvin Ailey and the Pivot

(8:29) The Invisible Arts

(9:06) The Power of Public Theater

(17:03) Curation, Programming and the Art of Listening

(23:42) San Juan Hill and The Wall

(31:23) Art as the Oldest Technology

(35:02) globalFEST: Music and Connection

(38:20) Finding Universal Belonging

(41:20) The Gift of Pause

(54:27) A Collective Caretaking

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."

Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent nineteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together."

Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—the nation's largest performing arts complex. Before stepping into this role, she spent sixteen years at The Public Theater, shaping the city's cultural landscape through Joe's Pub and expansive community initiatives. Today, she is tearing down walls—both the literal barriers separating Lincoln Center from its neighbors, and the figurative ones that dictate who belongs in our cultural spaces. She views the arts not as a luxury, but as essential civic infrastructure. We are pleased to have Shanta Thake to discuss her journey, the power of radical curation, and the future of public performance.

(00:00) Reimagining Lincoln Center

(03:09) A Collective Caretaking

(03:47) The Technology of Human Creation

(04:20) The Curiosity of Childhood

(09:25) San Juan Hill and The Wall

(14:20) globalFEST: Music and Connection

(16:06) The Gift of Pause

(17:20) A Collective Caretaking

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“In Paris, when these same people, who had friends who were their police, came to Paris and found themselves tear gassed and shot with LBDs and losing their eyes and feet, and coming back with red all down their faces and blood everywhere, and they began to understand that the violence is beyond legal. And so they began to understand what was happening in areas, what we might call the ghettos or the poor areas of Paris, where Black people or people of color were being harassed by the police.“

In 2018, hundreds of thousands of people in France showed up day after day, month after month, to protest the French government’s attacks on labor, on social benefits, and on the environment, among other things, including police violence. Anthropologist Ida Susser took part in these communal actions, interviewing a vast array of participants, who came from all walks of life, from political positions across the spectrum, and from many different regions and class identities. We learn how people formed common cause, organized unique social worlds, and how their struggles, defeats, and successes, can teach us critical lessons in making the a new, more just, world. In the spirit of communing, Ida Susser has made Yellow Vests a free download here.

Ida Susser, PHD is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY. Her recent book The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: taking to the streets of Paris in the 21st Century(Routledge 2026) focuses on commoning movements and new visions. Her previous books include: Norman Street(Oxford, 2012) a study of working class opposition to cutbacks during the New York City fiscal crisis and the transition of Greenpoint-Williamsburg from a working class neighborhood to a gentrified enclave, andAIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), a history of the power of social movements to transform health.

(0:00) The Reality of Police Violence in Paris

(1:00) The Yellow Vests Movement

(3:00) The Erosion of French Labor Laws

(7:05) The Beginnings of the Diesel Tax Protest

(11:00) The Three Commons and Progressive Transformation

(16:26) Building a Concrete Utopia

(22:16) The Success of the Nuit Debout Commissions

(27:57) The Birth of Co-op Cycle

(29:34) Redefining Class in the Flexible Economy

(34:45) Building a Historical Bloc

(38:05) Making Knowledge Free and Open Access

Episode Website

www.palumbo-liu.com

https://speakingoutofplace.com

Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social

IG @speaking_out_of_place

“When we look at police brutality, when we look at violent conditions, you can't break a cycle of violence with more violence. And the prison is, if not the most profound and devastating state sanctioned and institutional expression of violence, it is a violence incubator.”

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora about their new book, Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison. Along with two research assistants, Lora and Hinton pored over hundreds of essays by prisoners, found in the American Prison Writing Archive. They then selected and organized the essays found in this volume, offering illuminating introductions to each section.

Our discussion moves through many topics—the brutal, dehumanizing, and punitive nature of the prison system, the damage it does to lives both inside and outside prison, and the ways prisoners find to survive and offer each other support, despite being pitted against each other. At base, we consider how we, as a society, are “addicted to violence,” and why and how it is crucial to understand that violence can only produce more violence. These essays organically blend personal observations and stories with a deep understanding of the broad, systemic nature of violence.

(0:00) The violence incubator

(3:03) Harm and Punishment: Essay Collection

(4:18) Curating the American Prison Writing Archive

(8:29) A society addicted to violence

(13:00) A lack of cohesive theory

(15:23) Slow violence and medical neglect

(16:59) Childhood trauma and street corner refuges

(21:18) Rational responses to untenable conditions

(25:35) The picture of despair and heartache

(30:00) Razor wire, iron bars, and the slow boil

(32:47) Dancing in the penitentiary and moments of joy

(37:00) No one here gets out alive

(43:21) The logical response is abolition

(47:57) A silenced pedagogy for the future

Episode Website

www.palumbo-liu.com

https://speakingoutofplace.com

Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social

Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinovis widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prizefor Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.

Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.

(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia

(1:22) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling

(3:53) Translating the Atmosphere

(4:31) The Pandemic of the Past

(6:37) Death and the Gardener

(9:49) The Translators Calling

(11:00) Slowing Down Time

(13:14) Storytelling vs Propaganda

(15:54) Translating the Atmosphere

(18:19) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?

(20:56) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him

(23:43) The Importance of Hugging, Empathy and Storytelling

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.”

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinov is widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow, won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016, blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Joining him is Angela Rodel, a brilliant linguist, musician, and translator whose profound artistic empathy carries the flowing cadences of the Bulgarian language into vivid English. Together, this extraordinary creative duo made history by winning the 2023 International Booker Prize for Time Shelter—the first book written in Bulgarian to ever receive the honor.

Time Shelter is a masterfully dark, funny, and prescient novel. It begins with an enigmatic psychiatrist opening a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by meticulously recreating past decades to match their internal clocks. But the experiment quickly escapes the clinic walls, triggering a pan-European crisis where entire nations hold democratic referendums to choose which era of the past they will retreat into. It is a book that holds up a mirror to our own world, exploring what happens when a civilization faces a deficit of meaning and tries to weaponize nostalgia.

(0:00) The Trap of Nostalgia

(2:13) The Art of Translation

(5:44) The Pandemic of the Past

(11:30) Reading from ‘Time Shelter’

(14:28) Death and the Gardener

(19:34) The Translator's Calling

(26:05) Cultural Rhythms of the Bulgarian Language

(30:00) The Nonlinear Approach to Storytelling

(34:30) Separating Personal and Historical Pasts

(42:55) Storytelling vs Propaganda

(47:19) Bodies, Animals and the Loneliness of the Minotaur

(56:00) Reading ' Eight Minutes and 19 Seconds’

(1:00:28) What makes a good life? What has given your life meaning?

(1:04:18)   Childhood, Memory and Imagination

(1:10:38) Reflections on God and the Stories His Grandmother Told Him

(1:17:20) Education and the Empathic Imagination

(1:23:25) The Museum of Memory

(1:26:15) The Importance of Hugging and Empathy

(1:28:02) AI and the Future of Humanity

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast