In this episode of Narrative Edge, you join hosts Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya for a deep dive into John T. Edge’s memoir House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, a book that braids Southern food, family, and history into one candid narrative. Together, we explore how Edge, founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and host of the TV series TrueSouth, uses dishes from turnip greens to catfish stew to examine race, class, and belonging across the modern South. If you love Southern food writing, cultural history, and memoirs that are honest without being self-indulgent, this conversation will give you plenty to chew on.

Dive into Charles Sumner’s life and legacy, from his abolitionist roots in Boston to the “Crime Against Kansas” speech and the caning by Preston Brooks that galvanized the North. You hear how Sumner’s constitutional arguments shaped Republican thought, echoed in phrases like “freedom national, slavery sectional,” and how his ideas later surfaced in the Brown v. Board fight.

Peter and Orlando talk with Georgia writer and longtime teacher Alan Caldwell to discuss his first poetry collection, The Only Verse. You hear Caldwell read “Running for No Reason” and we explore how his work faces depression, grief, marriage, and memory with clarity and care. We also trace his path from fiction to the Carrollton Just Poetry group and discuss how story and image power his poems.

This episode explores Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi, a sweeping historical novel that reframes the Persephone myth in a reimagined fifteenth-century West Africa. You’ll hear why Ododo, a young blacksmith from Timbuktu, is one of the podcast's most compelling protagonists and how palace intrigue, shifting loyalties, and questions of agency drive this story. Peter and Orlando talk setting, character, and the real history behind the fiction to help you decide if this book belongs on your list.

If we knew that Coca-Cola was one of the deadliest products in the American diet, would we keep drinking it? In this episode, journalist Murray Carpenter joins Peter and Orlando to uncover the story behind his book Sweet and Deadly. You learn how soda corporations spent decades funding research, building shadow networks, and spreading disinformation to obscure the links between sugary drinks and chronic disease.

On this episode of Narrative Edge, Peter and Orlando dive into Colleen Oakley’s witty and fast-paced novel Jane and Dan at the End of the World. What begins as a tense dinner where Jane plans to ask for a divorce quickly turns into a chaotic hostage situation that feels ripped straight from the pages of her own failed book. With humor, heart, and unexpected twists, Oakley explores love, second chances, and what it takes to keep a marriage alive when the world feels like it’s falling apart.

Orlando Montoya and Peter Biello explore Spitfires by Becky Aikman, the story of American women who ferried aircraft for Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II, including Georgia pilot Hazel Jane Raines, whose daring flights and survival stories reveal the courage and skill of the “Atta Girls.”

Michael Hardwick had no idea that when a police officer stood at his bedroom door on August 3, 1982, he would become a face of the gay rights movement. Arrested for sodomy, Hardwick sued for his right to privacy to the Supreme Court, even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to take its toll. When he lost, his era-defining case inspired a half-million people to protest, and the ruling became one of the most reviled of its time.