Today, we’re talking to one of the most exciting literary voices I’ve personally discovered in the past year. Daniel José Older is the best-selling author of the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series and the young adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher. He also wrote my favorite of the 40 stories in the recent Star Wars anthology From a Certain Point of View. (Check out my review here.)

On this episode, we talk to Older about weaving together the different cultural elements that are so integral to his books and breaking out of the “write what you know” mentality. He recently wrote an incredibly insightful piece for BuzzFeed about writing “the other” and characters that don’t reflect your own lived experiences. We also talk about the joy of playing in the Star Wars sandbox (it’s been announced that he’s writing a Star Wars novel), how music influences his writing, his writing advice, and so much more!

You can listen on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher, and YouTube; you can follow the RSS feed; or you can listen right here!

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Connect:

• Daniel José Older is on Twitter here.
• The show is on Twitter here.
• Jamie is on Twitter and Instagram as @theroarbots.
• Shiri Sondheimer is on Twitter as @SWSondheimer.