In partnership with Sarabande Books, co-hosted by NPR’s Luke Burbank +  UI Nonfiction Writing Program Alum Elena Passarello, featuring Morgan Parker, Carmen Maria Machado, Simon Sheih, + S.G. Goodman. Live Wire Radio is a dynamically entertaining live radio show that artfully blends conversation and live music. Hosted by NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me’s Luke Burbank and University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program alum Elena Passarello, the seasoned program is produced in Portland, Oregon and will be co-presented live at Mission Creek by Sarabande Books, an independent nonprofit celebrating 30 years of publishing.

 Sarabande Books

Celebrating 30 years of independent nonprofit publishing, Sarabande is a proud co-sponsor of Mission Creek’s Live Wire Radio capstone literary event. Founded in Louisville, KY, in 1994, Sarabande champions poetry, short fiction, and essay, and Sarabande authors have been recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and many PEN/American honors. Among Sarabande’s notable authors are Live Wire’s beloved announcer Elena Passarello and special guest poet Simon Shieh.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” Parker’s debut book of nonfiction, You Get What You Pay For, comes out March 12, 2024.

Carmen Maria Machado  is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. 

Simon Shieh is the author of Master (Sarabande Books, 2023), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. His poems and essays are published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Guernica, and The Yale Review, among others, and have been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

S.G. Goodman is a Kentucky folk-rock musician coined by Rolling Stone as an “untamed rock n roll truth-teller.” Catch her performance at The Engert at 8:00 PM before the Live Wire podcast recording!