Meet the Co-Creator of Broads and Books Podcast

In this multilayered, provocative, and outrageously imaginative literary debut, Amy Lee Lillard gives us ten deeply absorbing stories about the women who won’t smile: angry, aching women reacting to the dismissal of their most secret or beloved needs and desires, women returning to base instincts, primal fears, and mythic power. Across past, present, and future, around the midwest and the world, these women demand we witness as they work to break through, to defy, to become. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be safe, but it will be real.

Spanning genres, continents, and eras, Dig Me Out takes on misogyny and homophobia, societal and climatological violence, and the specter of our technologized future — all with a punk rock literary twist. This collection constitutes a brilliant and rightfully dangerous work of art from a writer to tell your friends about.

Moderated by: Kali White VanBaale, a Des Moines-area creative writing professor and award-winning author of novels, short stories, essays, and articles. www.kaliwhite.com

About the Author

Amy Lee Lillard is the author of Dig Me Out from Atelier26 Books. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. Her fiction and nonfiction appears in Barrelhouse, Foglifter, Epiphany, Off Assignment, and other publications.

Amy has worked as a copywriter and marketer for over twenty years, working in advertising, corporate communications, trade journalism, and medical education. She has also taught writing at local community colleges and mentored in the PEN America Prison Writing Program.

Amy is the co-creator, co-host, and producer of Broads and Books, the funny and feminist book podcast.

She holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Pan-European program at Cedar Crest College, an MA in literature from Northwestern University, and a BA in English, journalism and psychology from the University of Iowa.

​Amy was born and raised in Iowa, lived in Chicago for many years, and now lives in Des Moines.