Monthly Archives: September 2026

Podcast

Breaking ICE: Sonali Kolhatkar on Community Defense, Immigration and Democracy

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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, childcare and transportation to families affected by detention and deportation.

We also talk about why she connects immigrant rights with labor rights and Black struggles against policing and state violence, and why she believes mutual aid can build political solidarity across unexpected divides.

Finally, we discuss electoral politics. Kolhatkar argues that movements shouldn’t organize themselves around politicians. Instead, elected officials should be treated as public servants accountable to organized communities.

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Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Lauren Markham, The Far Away Brothers, ILLEGALIZED: Rafael Martinez on Undocumented Youth Movements

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Podcast

James Baldwin & Keith Haring: Love, Art, Race and the Courage to Tell the Truth

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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 Baldwin’s life and art. Boggs describes love as central not only to Baldwin’s novels but to his political writing, and traces his journey from a difficult Harlem childhood and the Black church to his role as a writer, messenger and witness.

All of Baldwin’s work was about love. All of his novels were love stories… And his nonfiction writings, political writings, were also about love.” — Nicholas Boggs

Then, I revisit part of my 2024 conversation with Brad Gooch about Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Haring challenged the boundary between high and popular art, from his subway drawings to the Pop Shop. Gooch talks about Haring’s collaborations, his determination to communicate across class and cultural lines, and the legacy of his belief in “art for everybody.”

“Keith did everything that he could do to blow that system [the art market] apart.” — Brad Gooch

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: DaMaris Hill, A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING, Ta-Nahisi Coates, THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE

Tags: Black history, James Baldwin, queer artists, Keith Haring, Brad Gooch, Nicholas Bogss, queer writers, Writer’s Voice

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Podcast

James Crawford on THE VANISHING EARTH + Max Page on New York and 9/11

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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 mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the limits of a purely technological green transition, the rights of nature, climate litigation and the poisoned landscape of Butte, Montana, where environmental repair will have to continue indefinitely.

“The repair isn’t about returning us to what we were, it’s about facing what we are now.” — James Crawford

Then, to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we return to my 2009 interview with Max Page about The City’s End. Page traces two centuries of imagined catastrophes in New York, from political and economic collapse to nuclear annihilation and climate disaster.

His surprising argument is that destroying New York in our imagination isn’t only an expression of fear. It can also reveal how deeply we value the city and what we fear losing.

Follow us on Bluesky @writersvoice.bsky.social and subscribe to our Substack. Or find us on Instagram @WritersVoicePodcast.

Love good coffee? Want to support Writer’s Voice? Head on over to Larry’s Coffee using this LINK, and you’ll earn $30 for the show!

You might also like: Richard Heinberg, SNAKE OIL & Bill McKibben, OIL AND HONEY, Hope For The Climate Crisis: Michael Mann, OUR FRAGILE MOMENT

Tags: extraction, economic growth, rights of nature, public trust doctrine, James Crawford, The Vanishing Earth, green energy, lithium, 9/11, New York City, World Trade Center, Max Page, The City’s End

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