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The way to everyone’s heart is through their stomachs, right? Romance writers Jenn Bouchard and Jennifer Yen serve up tasty tours of love and cooking; then make your favorite recipes home to try yourself.

Two writers discuss power, position, and moving forward: M.M. Bailey in her flash piece “Smaller,” and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub in his poem “The Light at the Beginning of the Tunnel.” Bailey and Taub are two of the hundred writers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia featured in This is What America Looks Like – the first anthology from The Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 25 years. The book showcases work that represents this landmark historical moment of a social justice movement in the midst of a global pandemic. Editor Caroline Bock drops by to discuss the importance of these works.

With the right support, women facing teen pregnancy can find opportunities to achieve their academic and career goals. In Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families, Nicole Lynn Lewis’ shares her own story of becoming pregnant in high school and eventually overcoming the obstacles of poverty, classism, and systemic racism to attend the College of William & Mary, raise her daughter, and ultimately found the non-profit organization, Generation Hope.

How could a doctor who used poison to kill ten people in Britain and North America — a brazen crime wave as notorious as Jack the Ripper’s — be forgotten today? In The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, Dean Jobb exposes the flaws, corruption, and Victorian morality that permitted a doctor to remorselessly kill the very women who turned to him for help.

Award-winning poets Maggie Smith and Victoria Chang discuss the objects of everyday life and family history — a hallway mirror, a marriage license, a photograph — and how we come to terms and know ourselves through them.

From the medical tables to the séance parlor, two authors explore the stories of groundbreaking and norm-bending Victorian women. Emily Midorikawa’s Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, tells the stories of influencial women who gained fame and fortune by using their clairvoyant gifts to break gender and class barriers. Bookpage says, “Midorikawa unveils the triumphant, tragic and deeply unconventional lives of six of the Victorian era’s best known spirit mediums.” In Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine, Olivia Campbell uncovers the remarkable stories of three pioneering women who broke gender boundaries and earned medical degrees, creating medical care for women by women.

In his memoir, Notorious, Raphael Rowe details the twelve years he spent wrongly incarcerated for crimes including murder. After overturning his convictions in 2000, he became the first person of mixed race with dreadlocks to report for the BBC. Rowe is now the host of Netflix’s docuseries Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons bringing his understanding of the physical and emotional scars prisons can inflict on human beings from high tech lockdowns in Greenland to the dangerously overcrowded and underfunded prisons of the Philippines and South Africa. Rowe will be in conversation with David Skarbek, author of The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World.

A master of mystery and suspense, Jo Nesbø has shocked readers worldwide with his chilling Harry Hole novels — The Redeemer and The Snowman, and other fast-paced thrillers like The Kingdom. Now he’s back with a sinister collection: The Jealousy Man and Other Stories, filled with twisted minds, unscrupulous lovers, and heartrending fate.

Fact and fiction blend together in these two novels of female survival during wartime. In Suzanne Feldman’s, The Sisters of the Great War, two Baltimore sisters rely on their bond to survive the devastation of WWI Belgium as Ruth fulfills her unorthodox dream of becoming a doctor, and Elise discovers her place as a queer woman on the war front. Pam Jenoff’s The Woman with the Blue Star, is a gripping story set in Krakow during WWII as Ella, an affluent Polish teenager, aids Sadie, a Jewish girl her same age, who is hiding in the sewers below.

Just in time for Halloween, three writers weave tales that will thrill and chill you as illustrator Andrea Tsurumi brings their stories to life through her drawings. Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth takes the classic haunted house story and flips it on its head. Julya Oui’s Taiping Tales of Terror are campfire tales about gruesome creatures that serve as an homage to the writer’s hometown and her favorite horror writers. Isabel Yap’s collection of 13 sci fi, fabulist and horror stories, Never Have I Ever, surrounds readers with spells, tales, and urban legends.