Gangrey: The Podcast

Sonya Huber is an associate professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of five books, including “The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which she wrote for the British imprint Squint Books.

Huber is a reporter, memoirist and essayist who also frequently writes about social issues. Her memoir “Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir” delves into the many issues she has experienced in life with health care and insurance.

Her book “Opa Nobody” is a family memoir, as she seeks to understand her grandfather, who was a coal miner, union organizer and social activist in Nazi Germany.

Her new book “Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System” will be published by the University of Nebraska in 2017. Huber has also been published in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Washington Post Magazine.

She also teaches in the low-res MFA program at Fairfield University.

Kathryn Miles is the author of three books, including “Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy.” Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including Audubon, Best American Essays, Boston Globe, Ecotone, The New York Times, Outside, Pacific Standard, Popular Mechanics, and Time. 

 Her forthcoming book, “Quake Land,” examines the changing face of earthquake hazards in America, and will be published by Dutton in July 2017.

Miles currently serves as writer-in-residence at Green Mountain College, where she also teaches in the college’s low-residence graduate programs.  She lives with her family in Portland, Maine.

She recently wrote a piece that appeared in the Boston Globe about the death and ultimate recovery of a woman who got lost hiking the Appalachian Trail. We’ll talk with her about that story, as well as some of her other work.

 

 

Gangrey: The Podcast will be back with new episodes later this month after securing the use of a recording studio at WVOF 88.5, the student-run radio station at Fairfield University.

Over the summer, host and producer Matt Tullis moved from Ashland, Ohio, to Newtown, Connecticut. The podcast was previously recorded in the studios of 88.9 WRDL at Ashland University, where Tullis was an associate professor of journalism and digital media. Tullis is now an assistant professor of English and digital journalism at Fairfield University.

With the job change, Tullis will have more time to dedicate to the podcast, and expects to resume posting at least two episodes every month.

The first episode this fall is scheduled to be released on Sept. 27. That episode will feature Kathryn Miles, who recently had a piece in the Boston Globe about the last days of an Appalachian Trail hiker who got lost and ultimately died. Miles is also the author of three books, including her most recent book “Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy.”

The podcast has other guests lined up for this fall. They include:

• Skip Hollandsworth, an executive editor at Texas Monthly and the author of “The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer.”

• Eli Sanders, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his piece “The Bravest Woman in Seattle” and author of the book “While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent into Madness.”

• Sonya Huber, author of six books, including “The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

 

 

Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz are the founders of The Riveter Magazine, which just put out its fourth issue. They are both graduates of the University of Missouri journalism school. The Riveter publishes longform work by female reporters only. The idea for the magazine stemmed from the fact that, in 2012, while Ralph and Demkiewicz were students, the National Magazine Awards put out its list of nominees, and there wasn’t a single female nominated in the reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism or columns and commentary categories.

Ralph and Demkiewicz recently collaborated on the book, “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism,” which was edited by Joyce Hoffman and published by The Sager Group. Ralph and Demkiewicz interviewed all of the women included in the book and write “as told to” pieces on how those women got their start in journalism. A similar book is in the works for female magazine writers, as Ralph and Demkiewicz continue to work with Mike Sager to showcase the top female writers and reporters in the country.

Lane DeGregory is a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer at the Tampa Bay Times. In early January, the Times published a long story by DeGregory, told in three chapters, about a five-year-old girl whose father killed her by dropping her off a bridge into the ocean.

“The Long Fall of Phoebe Jonchuck” is a brutal yet powerful piece that shows how a sweet little girl was the victim of a child protective services system that let far too many children fall through the cracks. The editor on this story was Kelley Benham French, now a professor of practice at the Indiana University Media School. We featured French on the podcast after she wrote the three-part series, “Never Let Go.”

DeGregory won a Pulitzer in 2009 for feature writing for her story, “The Girl in the Window.” Her work has appeared in Best Newspaper Writing in four times. She has taught journalism at the University of South Florida – St. Petersburg, been a speaker at the Nieman Narrative Conference at Harvard University, and won dozens of national awards.

She’s also known for finding wonderful stories among everyday lives, including a piece on a flag-toting rodeo rider, and a boy buying a Valentine card for his first girlfriend.

 

Ed Caesar is the author of “Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.” The book chronicles the attempts of the world’s greatest marathon runners to inch closer and closer to the magical two-hour mark, and follows one runner in particular, Geoffrey Mutai.

Caesar has contributed to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Outside, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine and British GQ. He’s reported from a wide range of countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, and Iran. He’s written about secretive Russian oligarchs, African civil wars, marathon tennis matches, British murder trials, and more.

He’s also written celebrity profiles, as well as a profile on the greatest darts player to ever live.

In 2014, Caesar was named Journalist of the Year by the Foreign Press Association of London.