Our guest this week is Joziah Jason, a 5th grader from Ypsilanti Michigan who has his own bookish podcast, R.E.A.D. Books with Joziah. Each episode he picks a book and discusses it with guests.

May is Mental Health Awareness month so we decided to interview 2 authors whose new memoirs deal with their mental health issues and the addictions that resulted from those issues.

There is hardly a family who hasn’t been touched in some way by mental illness. For so many years, mental illness in all its forms--anxiety, depression, suicide or bipolar disorder--were kept under wraps which made the sufferers and their loved ones feel even more isolated.

This week we are getting in the “spirit” of the first Saturday of May; a date that is sacrosanct for many Kentuckians because of the running of the Kentucky Derby. A love of horses and bourbon whiskey are high on the list of things that Kentuckians are proud of and want to export to the rest of the world. Bourbon is big business in our region and has had a surge in popularity over the last decade; around 90 percent of all bourbon is produced here in the Bluegrass State. At no other time of the year is bourbon more popular in Louisville KY than during Derby season.

A Strong Sense of Place is both a podcast and a website where readers can find interesting bookish conversations with our guest this week, Melissa Joulwan, and her husband David, two expatriates living in Prague located in the Czech Republic. In this week’s episode, she tells us about how they select the places they will visit each season, why place in a book has to meet very stringent specifications, and how roller derby helped her make some big life decisions.

Our guest this week, debut novelist Christina Consolino would be one of those people. Christina grew up creating stories but also loved to read biographies of famous female scientists like the first female physicians in the United States; the Blackwell sisters. She loves to read fiction but decided to make a career in science by pursuing a PHD in physiology and teaching it at the college level. Like a lot of writers, the characters she created in her head wanted to come out; when they got louder, she knew it was time to embrace the life of a full-time author.

This week we talk with Sara Woods, the Kentucky Book Festival director. She brought her experience working with the Western Kentucky University sponsored Southern Kentucky Book Festival to her new position and from there brainstormed some fresh ideas about how to bring books to people even when, especially during Covid, people can’t come to the books.

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.

Capote’s own life is the subject of the one man play, Tru, written by Jay Presson Allen which appeared on Broadway in 1989. The play is now being performed by local theater company Pandora Productions, a group that focuses on producing plays by and/or about LGBTQ people, as an on-demand show available for two weeks: March 26-28 and April 2-4. This production of Tru stars Louisvillian Jason Cooper, a veteran theater artist. He started his own theater company, The Chicken Coop Theater, 2 years ago which focuses on producing lesser known plays. But he is also a high school English teacher at a private school where he is engaging the next generation in the love of reading and has just completed writing a memoir as part of a Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program. Jason has immersed himself in the life of an artist whether it be acting, directing, literary appreciation, or writing.

This week, we talk to the deputy director of the Louisville Story Program Joe Manning. He is a songwriter/ musical performer as well as an author whose collection of essays about his experience as a young man on a merchant freighter that traveled the globe is called Certain Relevant Passages and was published in 2017.

When I say the word “zoo” your first thought is probably elephants or giraffes; maybe a great memory of going on a school field trip or of taking your own children there for a special outing. A word you probably don’t associate with a zoo is “Book club”. But our guest today, Katy Morrison, a zoo educator at the Louisville Zoo, wants to broaden your vision a bit. At the beginning of the pandemic, she was brainstorming ways that the zoo could still serve its patrons virtually, especially adult patrons who are often not the focus of zoo outreach. And then she read a book on primates that she was dying to talk about with someone. So she pitched the idea of the Conservation and Conversation bookclub to the zoo and it was soon full steam ahead for her vision of non-traditional education through book discussions.