Jon Kinally is a long-time writer for television who, along with his writing partner, Tracy Poust, has written for such TV shows as Will & Grace, Ugly Betty, 2 Broke Girls as well as many others. Over the years, they have received several Emmy nominations as well as a Writer’s Guild Award for Outstanding Writing in Episodic Comedy. Jon Kinnally has now turned his eye to memoir, and has just published his debut book, I’m, Prancing As Fast As I Can: My Journey From a Self-Loathing Closet Case to a Successful TV Writer With Some Self-Esteem just out from Permuted Press. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

Khadijah VanBrackle's debut novel, Fatima Takes the Cake, brings us to the intersection of culture, gender and religion and throws in some baking, which is a very fun addition. Her new novel, My Perfect Family, gives us an intergenerational narrative that covers the complex relationships mothers and daughter and explores what it means to be a Black Muslin woman in America. As a Black Muslim woman in America and as the mother of five, she is a living example of the adage to write what you know. That debut novel was a 2024 NAACP Image Award finalist for Outstanding Youth/Teens literature, a School Library journal’s Teen Librarian Toolbox Favorite Young Adult Read of 2023 and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. In 2021, she was selected for the Highlights Foundation Muslim Storytellers Fellowship. Her new novel pormises to be award-winning, as well. Listen in as she and I discuss her themes of being a Black Muslim in America, that ever-popular topic of family secrets as well what it means to be a young person forging one’s own path. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.

The author and writer J. E. Thomas is an award-winning freelance journalist, whose first bok, Control Freaks, was a People Magazine Summer Must-Read as a Best of the Best pick by the Black caucus of the American Library Association. Her new book is The AI Incident, just out from Levine Quierido, and distributed by Chronicle Books. Listen in as she and I discuss how to create a surprise opening to a book, how to write into what's coming next, as well as how to write into the difficult territory of foster care in America. The QWERTY podcast is brought to you by the book The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. Read it, and begin your own journey to writing what you know. To learn more, join The Memoir Project free newsletter list and keep up to date on all our free webinars, instructive posts and online classes in how to write memoir, as well as our talented, available memoir editors and memoir coaches, podcast guests and more.