Live Wire with Luke Burbank

Atsuko Okatsuka is an award-winning comedian and actress making waves across the globe with her one-of-a-kind humor, boundless energy, and infectious charm. Her highly anticipated second stand-up special, Father, recently premiered on Hulu and internationally on Disney+. It quickly occupied the top ten on the streamer and had multiple clips go viral, making it one of the most talked about specials to debut on the Hularious brand. Following the success of Father, she recently embarked on The Big Bowl tour, which will hit multiple cities across America.

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, won Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a Publishing Triangle Award finalist. She co-edited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.

Laura Gibson is an internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, producer and writer, born and raised in the small Oregon logging town of Coquille. Both literary and raw, with a love of traditional folk music and a bent toward experimentation, she has performed on four continents and had the distinct honor of playing the very first (and 200th) NPR Tiny Desk Concert. The New York Times has described her themes as “longing and instinct, and whether they can ever converge.” Her most recent album Goners (Barsuk/City Slang) was praised by NPR as “a gripping collection of songs about accountability and grief.” The Fader called it, “so incessantly beautiful that one cannot help but want to gently crack it open to get to its beating core.” Between albums three and four, Gibson earned an MFA in fiction writing from Hunter College, completing her thesis in the back of a tour van. Her essays have appeared in Talkhouse, the Los Angeles Review, and Oregon Humanities Magazine, and she was a 2020 recipient of the McElheny Award from MIT for her work on the Timber Wars podcast. She is currently prepping a new album while very slowly working on a book.