Episode 2: Fiction writer Joy Notoma interviews alumnus Sarah Cypher, author of The Skin and Its Girl.
Follow along with the written transcript here.
Next Chapter, Episode 2 Credits:Next Chapteris sponsored by Friends of Writers, a nonprofit 501c3 organization. The second episode was created and produced by MFA Program former inclusion interns Nicole W. Lee, Rowan Sharp, Teri Vela, and Priscilla Wathington, with support from Wafa-e-fatima, and Warren Wilson faculty David Haynes and Christine Kitano. The audio was edited and produced by Mer Luchs and Nicole W. Lee, the podcast music was composed by Chad Wathington, and the cover art is by Rowan Sharp. Thanks to the students and alumni of Warren Wilson who supported this project.
Next Chapter is a podcast created by the inclusion interns at MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College through the generous support of Friends of Writers. The podcast features interviews between BIPOC/LGBTQ+ students and alums with forthcoming or recently released books. Through conversations, Next Chapter explores connections between the work, the writing process, and the writing life and celebrates the mentors, creative lineage, and culture/s particular to each author. The podcast hopes to bring awareness to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine), a Stonewall Honor Book also shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, the Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Mizna, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She will be a 2025 artist-in-residence at Austin’s Wild Basin Preserve, and her work has received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. She currently serves on the board of RAWI, a literary nonprofit that creates a community for writers of Southwest Asian and North African descent. She grew up in a Lebanese family near Pittsburgh and now lives in Austin, Texas, with her wife.
Instagram: @sarahcypher
Joy Notoma is a Nigerian-American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist, based in Toulouse, France. Her writing has been published by Ploughshares, Epiphany, Longreads, CNN, and Al Jazeera, and elsewhere. Joy is a Sustainable Arts Foundation grantee, a 2022 Kimbilio fellow, a 2023 Roots.Wounds.Words fiction fellow and an alum of Tin House and The Hurston/Wright Foundation fiction cohorts. She is a Holden Scholar in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson where she is writing her debut novel and short story collection.
Instagram: @joywriteshermedicine
