American novelist Olive Higgins Prouty served as both benefactress and mentor to a young Sylvia Plath —  she’s depicted in The Bell Jar as the elderly patroness Philomena Guinea. Knowing that Prouty helped procure and pay for Plat...

“Queen of the Dunes” Hazel Hawthorne was a Cape Cod legend who wrote about The Road nearly two decades before her one-time tenant, Jack Kerouac. A uniquely feminine precursor to Beat literature, her novel Salt House captures Bohemian l...

She wrote a book in defense of traditional homemaking — only to pen an about-face reckoning decades later when her 40-year-marriage went belly-up. In this episode, Amy discusses Disregard First Book author Terry Martin Hekker, who pass...

In this encore presentation, Kim and Amy take stock by dusting off a "New Year’s" episode from 1921, sharing secrets of what makes their writing partnership work and turning to famous women writers — including Nancy Mitford, Isabelle Allende, A...

Amy elaborates on the reading goals she’s set for herself in 2026 to help center her distracted mind, including her mission to read at least one poem a day. The compelling joint biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Romantic Ou...