AIR DATE 11/3/14: We loved talking to Abbi Crutchfield, comedian extraordinaire.  She talks about embracing her Mixed identity and has advice for aspiring comics–and a special message to any mixed chicks who are interested in pursuing comedy too.  You can learn more about her in our interview and follow her on Twitter where she is known as @curlycomedy!  You can also download this episode and all past episodes on itunes.–Heidi Durrow

Abbi Crutchfield is a comedian and host of People Now. She has been featured on Comedy Central, VH1, CollegeHumor and in national commercials. Her jokes are listed among the Best Tweets of the Year by Huffington Post Comedy.  She is a contributor to Someecards, a UCB alum and produces The Living Room Show monthly in New York City.

AIR DATE October 27, 2014: It’s so exciting to talk with Santana Dempsey.  I’ve been following Santana in her journey as a working actor in LA for many years now and she’s really making it happen!  Plus, I love the double headshot on her website (one with straight hair and one with curly hair–and yes, we must talk about hair during her interview).  She is a multi-talented actress who is appearing in film and TV shows. And now has her own one-woman show in the works.  We had an amazing talk with Santana. She’s a wonderful example of someone who is living her truth and story outloud and makes us all braver for it!  You can also download the epidsode on itunes.–Heidi Durrow

When Santana Dempsey was six years old, she and her younger sister were adopted by two very creative, open-minded, and loving parents.  Since they were of a different race and heritage than Santana, an unusual multi-cultural environment was formed, especially in the environs of Hannibal, Missouri, a place that keeps the legacy of Mark Twain alive but also has some unfortunate racial tensions still simmering beneath the surface.  Luckily, her supportive parents were always there when negative mindsets threatened to hold her back.  She was so determined to show that she was capable of anything she put her mind to that she played on the boys’ football team in middle school, just because she was told that girls couldn’t play a man’s sport.

However, Santana always had a truer way to express herself than football.  As a little girl, she choreographed her own routines to Whitney Houston and put on shows for whoever would watch.  Later, she helped her parents memorize lines for productions at the community theater.  Eventually, she herself was performing in the theater, dancing, and winning speech contests by speaking truthfully about taboo subjects in her small town.  She also studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, pursuing her love of travel, different cultures, and the Spanish language.

Finally, her pursuit of performance was formalized when she graduated from the University of Missouri with a B.A. in Theatre Performance.  Three days after graduation, she moved to New York with nothing except her determination and endless love for art, in all shapes, colors, and forms.  There, she continued her life-long pursuit of pushing both her own artistic boundaries and those of the people lucky enough to know her.

Currently, Santana is an Actress, Writer, Adoption/Mixed Race Advocate, and Abstract Painter/Collagist in Los Angeles.

October 20, 2014: I was lucky enough to get an advance reading copy of A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, a most excellent book by Stanford Professor Allyson Hobbs.  She recently did a TED Talk about the role of grief in these narratives of racial crossing.  The book very aptly and eloquently “examines how passing became both a strategy for survival and an avenue to loss.”  You will love this interview with Allyson Hobbs as she explains the inspiration for this book, a brief discussion on the idea of “passing as black” and much much more.  You can also download the episode on itunes.–Heidi Durrow

Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Stanford University.  She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and she received a Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago.  She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She is particularly interested in identity formation, racial mixture, migration and urbanization, and the intersections of race, class and gender.

She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Hoefer Faculty Mentor Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award.

We loved talking with blogger Sharon Chang who spearheads the Multiasian Families blog.  Sharon is a multiracial Asian woman and mom of a multiracial child. She’s currently at work on a book about multiracial Asian identity in early childhood–a scholarly work that has grown out of her graduate study and work into human development with an early childhood specialization.  You can also find Sharon on Twitter at @multiasianfams.  Listen to the episode here. Or download the episode from itunes.–Heidi Durrow

Sharon Chang is a multiracial Asian woman and a Seattle mom working to offer support and raise awareness around the unique experiences of multiracial Asian families. She defines multiracial Asians as ANY family of partial Asian descent including multiethnic Asian and mixed families of color as well as all TYPES including blended, chosen, adoptive, LGBTQ, etc. Her blog continues to question and open up what it means to be of mixed heritage and how that heritage intersects (among many things)and ties to roots in Asia and Asian America. Sharon holds a MA in Human Development with an Early Childhood Specialization and has taught young children for over a decade. Currently she is working on a 2015 book for Paradigm Publishers examining multiracial Asian ID in early childhood. She also is a contributor at Racism Review and ParentMap Magazine. The blog is professional, but also very personal – it’s about Sharon’s life living mixed-race, her partnership with a mixed-race man and now, their journey parenting a mixed-race son.

We’re so excited to speak with Priscilla Yuki Wilson who is known as the biracial woman who asked photographers around the world to “make her beautiful.”  “I am living in a culture that’s still adjusting to my kind of face,” she has explained. “I was taught that my natural self did not comply with conventional standards set forth by society, saying fairer skin is better, straighter hair is more attractive, and that skinny tastes good.”  You’ve seen the images now hear the voice behind the project! BTW: this is a great interview.  Priscilla is 23, but wise beyond her years.  I can’t wait to see what she does next. —Heidi Durrow P.S. You can always download the episodes on itunes for free.

Priscilla Yuki Wilson is a “Jacklyn” of all trades. From acting to radio journalism to experimental video making, she enjoys dabbling in various avenues.

After receiving a degree in Psychology and Journalism from the prestigious college for women, Mills College in Oakland, CA, she moved back to her hometown of Los Angeles to join the city full of dreamers.

Priscilla’s main passion is story-telling. Whether it be as an actor on stage, a voice behind a mic in a studio, or sitting across from a friend at a coffee shop, her drive to share some sliver of the human experience is the foundation of everything that she does. A forever seeker, her desire for everything that she creates or is a part of  is to marry the the reality of the macrocosm to the truth within the microcosm.

I’m very excited to speak with author and blogger Matthew Salesses on this episode.  Matthew is an author, blogger (The Good Men Project), and currently working on his doctorate at the University of Houston.  He is Korean-born and adopted by an American family at age 2.  Listen in to this interesting conversation about his Mixed experience, his writing and his work.-Heidi Durrow

You can hear the podcast here or download it from itunes.

Matthew Salesses is the author of a novel, I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; a novella, The Last Repatriate; two ebooks, Different Racisms and the forthcoming All-American Bear Terrorizes Canada, both from Thought Catalog Books; and two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics and We Will Take What We Can Get. His latest project is a serialized novel, Marked, to be illustrated and published by Gazillion Voices.

Matthew was adopted from Korea at age two, and writes a column about his Korean wife and their baby for The Good Men Project. He also serves as the Project’s Fiction Editor. He has written for The New York Times Motherlode blog, NPR Code Switch, the Center for Asian American Media, Salon, Glimmer Train, The Rumpus, Hyphen, American Short Fiction, and others.

Matthew has received awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, [PANK], HTMLGIANT, IMPAC, Inprint, and others. He did his MFA at Emerson College, where he edited Redivider Journal, and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston.

Matthew teaches creative writing at Inprint, Writespace, Grub Street, and elsewhere, both in the classroom and online.

LIVE October 10, 2014 at 1PM EASTERN: Writer Jess Row is stirring things up with his new book, Your Face in Mine, about a white Jewish man who undergoes racial re-assignment surgery and becomes a black man.  You can read a little about the book here in a New York Times story by Felicia Lee. And read Festival favorite writer Emily Raboteau’s New York Times Book Review take on the book here.

We also talked with him about what he means when he talks about being “All in the mix.” This is a great interview so check it out here or download it on itunes.–Heidi Durrow

Jess Row was born in 1974 in Washington, DC. After graduating from Yale in 1997, he taught English for two years as a Yale-China fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He completed an MFA at the University of Michigan in 2001. His first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. In 2007 he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His second collection of stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, was published by FiveChapters Books in February 2011. His first novel, Your Face in Mine, will be published by Riverhead Books in August 2014.

His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Granta, American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, Ontario Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories (most recently in The Best American Short Stories 2011) and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has also received an NEA fellowship in fiction and a Whiting Writers Award. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum,Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues.

Jess is an associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey and a member of the international faculty of the MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong.He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children. A student of Zen for twenty years, he is an ordained dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.

He can be reached at rowjess [at] gmail.com.

In this episode, I revisit an interview I did with Stanford Professor Michele Elam, author of The Souls of Mixed Folks in September 2011.  It’s a great conversation and all so relevant today.  Listen to it here.  You can  also download it on itunes.–Heidi Durrow