An intimate conversation between Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie and Lisa Bunker about cultivating mindfulness, writing from our tender centers, and moving towards our most authentic works while navigating the challenges of life and the publishing industry.

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is the author of Strut (Agape Editions), Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation (Grand Concourse Press) and Karma’s Footsteps (Flipped Eye Publishing). She served as Poetry Editor of African Voices from 2013 to 2017. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Tallie is the subject of a short film “I Leave My Colors Everywhere.” Tallie earned an MFA from Mills College. She’s currently a Ph.D. student at Brown University.

Lisa Bunker works full time as a writer. Her first novel, Felix Yz, about a boy fused with an alien, was published by Viking in June 2017. Her second novel, Zenobia July, about a trans girl getting to live as a girl for the first time in a new family and school, came out, also from Viking, in Spring 2019. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire with her wife, Dawn Huebner, a child psychologist and author in her own right. Between them they have three grown children. In 2018 Lisa was elected to serve her town in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. Her author website is at www.lisabunker.net, and you can find her on Twitter @LisaBunker.