There is a saying, “If you want a happy ending, read a cookbook”. Our guest, Laura Lucchese, is in a book club that always ends well because her group reads and then produces a group meal from cookbooks.

Our guest this week, Mindy Jett, is a self-professed book nerd who still gravitates toward YA fiction even though she has teenagers of her own. She talks about how reading YA is just like immersing yourself in a sci-fi world or a different time period except it is the world from a teen perspective. We discuss how reading YA fiction has given her more insight into her own children, and how much nostalgia from her own childhood plays into her love of books from that era.

Our guest this week, Tori Murden McClure, is a Renaissance woman. She has a law degree, a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard as well as a Master of Fine Arts from Spalding University, the institution where she currently serves as President. She was the first woman and first American to ski 750 miles to the geographic South Pole. She worked as an assistant to Muhammad Ali at the Ali Center, and has served as a chaplain in Boston area hospitals. But what she is most known for is her solo journey to successfully row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean in 1999. Ten years later, she published her memoir about that experience, A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

This week’s episode is a rebroadcast of episode 25, where we featured two librarians from the Northeast Regional branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. Mk Eagle and Hannah Elliott talked about Books and Brews 502, which is similar to the Library’s summer reading program for kids, except it is for adults and can include beer and coffee.

While the in-person Christmas Carol performance has long been a feast for the eyes, the radio program will be a feast for the ears. Our guest this week, Amy Wegener, will give us the scoop on how we can interact with The Christmas Carol in a whole new exciting way. She is the literary director and a dramaturg at Actor’s Theater.

Our guest this week is Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, a member of the Eastern Tribe of Cherokee Indians, who is deeply rooted in the Cherokee community in North Carolina. She has been a high school English and Cherokee Studies teacher for the past 10 years. But she is also a novelist whose debut historical fiction novel, Even As We Breathe, was published this past September by a new literary imprint called Fireside Industries, a collaboration between The Appalachian Writers Workshop and the University Press of Kentucky.

We have two guests this week, First we have Amy Attaway, who is the associate artistic director of Kentucky Shakespeare and runs the Shakespeare with Veterans program. Then later on in the show, we will be joined by Stephen Montgomery who is a Vietnam veteran who served in both the Army and Navy and was a career intelligence officer until his retirement several years ago. He is a member of the Shakespeare with Veterans group.

Our little goblins and ghouls may still be counting their candy from Halloween and Thanksgiving is still several weeks away but small businesses including bookstores are encouraging shoppers to start grabbing those gifts early this year for multiple reasons. So today we talk to our favorite bookseller, Sam Miller of Carmichael Books in Louisville, about what books and gifts readers may want to check out this holiday season.

We all probably need a good laugh right about now and our guest this week, humorist Andrew Shaffer, is the one to provide it. Andrew is the New York Times best-selling author of the Obama Biden series, a buddy detective mystery series which includes Hope Never Dies and Hope Rides Again. His new book that comes out in November is called Secret Santa and is a clash of the holidays ; Halloween and Christmas; a comedic book that combines horror and holiday vibes about a holiday office party gone bad. He is the author of 11 books in several genres but says that humor is the theme that ties all his books together.

It’s spooky season and we would be remiss if we didn’t explore a bit the things that make us unsettled and feel that four letter word FEAR. Our guest this week, Tim Waggoner, is a horror and dark fantasy writer who has been recognized in his field with awards such as the Shirley Jackson and the Bram Stoker Award. He is also an educator at heart. He is a professor at Sinclair College in Dayton OH where he teaches a wide variety of writing classes from basic composition all the way up to novel writing and tips for getting published. He has recently published a book that is a comprehensive guide to the craft of writing horror fiction called Writing in the Dark.