Thresholds

Jordan sits down with Valeria Luiselli to talk about the U.S.-Mexico border, and in particular its origin point (or terminus) in the Pacific Ocean. They discuss Luiselli's forays into sound art with her new project "Echos from the Borderlands", her choice to set her next novel in Sicily, and the humor of whale song.

Valeria Luiselli is the author of Sidewalks (2013), Faces in the Crowd (2014), The Story of My Teeth (2015), Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and Lost Children Archive (2019). She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. Her next book, a novel titled Beginning Middle End, will be published by Random House in July 2026.
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In the penultimate episode of the series, Jordan sits down to talk with poet Aracelis Girmay about the way that reading --especially discovering the works of Toni Morrison as a teenager-- changed her life.

Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes works across genres. She is the author of the poetry collections GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA, 2025), the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). She is the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University.
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Jordan sits down with author Jayson Greene during a live taping of Thresholds at the Beverly Theater in Las Vegas, Nevada. The two talk about Jayson's new novel, UnWorld, the uncanniness of grief, the instability of memory, and how presciently his novel anticipated the way AI is changing human intimacy.

Jayson Greene is an author, music critic and editor. He has served as a senior editor of Pitchfork and is the author of Once More We Saw Stars, a memoir about the death of his two-year-old daughter, in 2015. His novel, UnWorld, is out now from Random House.

Special thanks to our partners at the Black Mountain Institute for hosting this conversation.
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Jordan sits down to talk with bestselling novelist Tayari Jones about the power and satisfaction of moving back home after decades away, and how her new novel, KIN, changed the scope of her work.

Mentioned in the episode:
Beaches
Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, including the international bestseller, AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE. Her new novel, out this month, is KIN. She is the winner of the Women’s Prize, Aspen Words Prize and NAACP Image award. She is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and the A.D White Professor at large at Cornell University.

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Thresholds is happy to introduce "Borrowed & Returned," a new podcast from the Brooklyn Public Library about the books that have changed America. This episode was made in partnership between Borrowed & Returned and Thresholds. You can hear the whole interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in our feed.

Episode description:

When Silent Spring came out in 1962, it was an instant best-seller and led to the establishment of the EPA, as well as the ban of harmful pesticides such as DDT. But Rachel Carson’s seminal work also shifted our way of thinking about nature. For the first time, the environment was not just something out there that could be tracked and measured, but something that lived inside all of us.

Hear more of Borrowed & Returned at https://www.bklynlibrary.org/podcasts/
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