Lit Up

Always a treat to stumble upon a thoughtfully curated independent bookshop like (the brick-and-mortar shop from ) in Santa Monica, as our Editorial & Marketing consultant did today! Their shelves are imaginatively organized by mood & theme, with many rows of books hand-selected by friends of Lit Up, like .fitzgerald. Also spotted: books by former guests & ! We’ll be back, Zibby’s! 🩵📚🌴🩵

This week, we’d like to recommend a new reading list by Jennifer Maritza McCauley (), author of the newly arrived collection When Trying to Return Home, out from , whose stories span a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond. Jennifer’s list, published by Electric Literature (), features 10 Afro-Latina poets, fiction writers, and memoirists whose work explores multifaceted experiences of inhabiting multiple identities.

Recommendations include Jasminne Mendez (), Houston-based, Dominican-American poet and author of the personal essay and poetry collection Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e (from ); Yesenia Montilla (), author of the poetry collections The Pink Box and Muse Found in a Colonized Body (Willow Books); and Amina Gautier, author of the short story collection The Loss of All Lost Thing (Elixir Press), among many writers and reads we’re excited about.

(We’ve linked to the full list in our Stories!)

What are you currently reading & loving right now? Let us know! ✨

Welcome to a new year of Lit Up! ✨

This week I’m excited to share my recent conversation with Tarajia Morrell (), food & travel writer and founder of The Lovage, a blog dedicated to her “lifelong love affair with food.”

Tarajia has a gift for finding remarkable characters through food, and her sensibilities as a writer were shaped in part growing up in a household where cooking and sharing meals were the most important parts of the day—“how love was expressed.”

Much of our conversation focuses on Tarajia’s deeply meaningful collaboration with the late chef Fatima Ali on Savor: A Chef's Hunger for More, her posthumous memoir exploring food and adventure, illness and mortality, with contributions by Fatima’s mother, Farezeh.

Later in the episode, we also swap tips for the perfect roast chicken as we make our way through these last winter months.🕯️🥘🧡

Settle in, enjoy, and we’ll be back with more in two weeks!

It’s Lit Up’s final episode of the year! Of course, we couldn’t leave you without some stellar book recs to gift this holiday season (or for any celebratory occasion, really)! Check out this episode’s show notes for the full list. 💝

This week I’m welcoming special guest Ruby Smith, my colleague at Sugar23 Books, former NYC bookseller, and one of the most voracious readers I have the pleasure to know, to share her recommendations with us!

Listeners, we also invite you to share a new favorite book you discovered in 2022 in the comments 🔮

From all of us at Lit Up: thank you, thank you for listening this year, supporting independent bookshops, celebrating the writers & readers in your life, and continuing to support the show. Here’s to a very bright new year, filled with the kind of writing that bring us more clarity, wisdom, & delight. More from us in 2023! 🥂

What is it about Shakespeare that’s made his work so resonant, over 400 years later?

Enter ’sAWill, in which ’s Artistic Director Barry Edelstein gets to the bottom of Shakespeare’s timelessness. This week, we’re excited to share a special preview of this new podcast, thanks to our friends at 🧡

Hear the full episode and more from Where There’s a Will, wherever you listen to Lit Up⚡️