How Literature Can Save the World

Hub City Writers Project is a literary nonprofit organization located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Comprised of an acclaimed literary book publisher, an independent bookshop, and a literary programmer focused on education and outreach, our mission is cultivating readers and nurturing writers in both the Spartanburg community and throughout the South to foster an inclusive literary arts culture.
Find their books at Hub City Writers Project | Independent Press, Bookshop, and Literary Programming

Stacey Levine is the author of the novel Mice 1961, a finalist for the2025 Pulitzer Prize that the Washington Post called “a rich andsurprising country of curious hilarity, skewed lighting, awkwardpratfalls, and ludicrous conversations.” Also the author of The Girlwith Brown Fur: Tales & Stories, Frances Johnson, and My Horse andOther Stories, Levine received a PEN USA fiction award, a StrangerGenius Literature Award, and other honors for her work. Her reviewsand fiction have appeared in Tin House, Fence, Yeti, The Iowa Review,Bookforum, and The Seattle Times. A collection of her recent and pastshort fiction is forthcoming.

Daniel Seifert's writing is published in The New York Times, Consequence, and Gulf Coast. His work received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize 2026 anthology, and has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. He lives in Singapore, and is working on a novel. 

Ibrahim Fawzy,  is a literary translator, academic and writer from Egypt. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature. His translations, reviews and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in ArabLit Quarterly, Words Without Borders, The Markaz Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, among others. He is currently an editorial assistant at Rowayat, and podcasts at New Books Network. In 2023, he finished a six-month mentorship with the British National Centre for Writing. He was a recipient of Culture Resource’s 2023 Wijhat grant. His translation of Khalid Al-Nasrallah’s The White Line of Night won the 2023 English PEN Presents. His translation of Rema Hmoud’s “Glass” has been shortlisted for Deep Vellum’s The Best Literary Translations 2024 Anthology.

Mara Karlin, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, Brookings Institute Fellow and Director for Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The Inheritance. 

Matt K. Parker has been many things in his life: a musician, a programmer, an activist, a writer, a consultant, a business owner, a husband, a father. And he's lived in many places, including Texas, New York, California, and Connecticut. But amidst all the life and career changes, and all the moving from one coast to the other and back, the one constant in his life has been reading. 
 
Whether hiding with a book in his closet as a kid, or burying his nose in a book on a subway train, or waking up before dawn to get a quiet hour of reading done before his many boisterous children awaken, Matt has always found refuge in reading. And although his reading tastes have varied widely over his life, he has, for the last few years, increasingly settled into reading literature, from the ancient to the contemporary. 
 
Today, Matt likes to interact with other fans of literature on Twitter, where he both sources recommendations for books from others, and also shares out his own thoughts on what he's reading. And Matt currently dreams of founding a non-profit dedicated to increasing adult literature readership by an order of magnitude, focused first on readership in the United States, but then expanding to the entire globe.
 
You can follow Matt on twitter at @realmattkparker.

Watch this episode here: https://youtu.be/5fsc-6-XpNU
 

Randy Winston, writer, Director of Fiction at The Black List, host of the podcast, Read the Acknowledgments, and former Creative Director for the Center for Fiction. Find him at RW.
Watch this interview at https://youtu.be/kePiTHOhDLU 

Hugh Martin, poet and author of In Country and The Stick Soldiers, editor of War, Literature, and the Arts, professor, and veteran of the conflict in Iraq.

Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned, Marval and a Wonder, The Boy Detective Fails, and Book of Extraordinary Tragedies; editor and professor.