Lit Hub’s Thresholds Podcast w/ Jordan Kisner, Ganavya, and Kaveh Akbar. Thresholds is a series of interviews with writers and artists you love about the transformative experiences (surprises, crises, existential freakouts, u-turns, breakthroughs) that have shaped their work.

Jordan Kisner

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places, named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic, and her writing also appears in New York  The Believer, n+1, The Paris Review online, and many others. She’s the founder and host of the podcast Thresholds, and currently serves as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa.

Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in the New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017), and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Penguin 2022). Born in Tehran, Iran, Akbar teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. Since 2020, he has served as poetry editor for The Nation.

Ganavya

With a voice described as “a thick ephemera” (New York Times), with an “aching emotional intensity” (JazzTimes), “extraordinary” (DownBeat), and “haunting” (All About Jazz) vocalist, scholar, and multi instrumentalist ganavya lives, learns, and loves fluidly from many frameworks and understandings. Her recent works include writing and singing the first Tamil words to win a Latin Grammy, featured solo vocalist on Grammy award-winning Songwrights Apothecary Lab (2021), leading a 3-day long spi/ritual gathering to honor Swami Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda titled Daughter of a Temple featuring esperanza spalding, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins, Chris Sholar and many others (2022); solo vocalist and composer for the film this body is so impermanent…directed by Peter Sellars (2021); composition, dance and solo voice for Chapter 7: The Goddess directed by Peter Sellars, and Jerome Foundation commission Let’s Go Out and Play (2021).