KICKSTARTER

The writers will read their own stories, so listeners can hear the words read the way they’re intended—the way the author hears them as she or he writes. 

Listen to part one of our first episode: "Life of Salvage" by Frank Bill

The show will be produced for broadcast in the WFPL listening area, available online via podcast and offered for syndication to other public radio stations. The show will launch this summer.

Our goal is to help give fiction fans and writers a space to connect through public radio. The communal aspect of a public radio show brings reading outside of living rooms and university classes and into the public space, encouraging community-wide discourse on the importance of literature in our daily lives.  

Increasing the public’s access to exciting new fiction helps build an actively literate community, a community that reads and writes, visits the library, and both values and understands the power of the written and spoken word.

Funding:

One ten-episode season will cost approximately $9,000 in production expenses, contributor payments, and promotional costs. Louisville Public Media has secured a sponsor for the show to cover more than half of these costs, so Unbound will be made possible in part by the Bachelors and Masters Writing Programs at Spalding University.

We are seeking $4,000 from Kickstarter contributors – radio and fiction fans like you– to make up the rest. 

Production expenses include time in partner radio stations to record authors who aren’t close enough to record at Louisville Public Media studios. Promotional and outreach efforts will help ensure the long-term viability of this project, as we want to continue the show after season one. And, of course, we pay our contributors, because a writer’s time and talent have value.

Louisville Public Media is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. Donations to Louisville Public Media on Kickstarter are tax deductible.

Good Stories:

The first season will focus on writers who have published at least one story collection or novel—exciting voices creating a buzz in the literary landscape, like Frank Bill ("Crimes in Southern Indiana," "Donnybrook"), Gwenda Bond ("Blackwood"), Holly Goddard Jones (“Girl Trouble”), Neela Vaswani (“Where the Long Grass Bends,” "Same Sun Here"), Silas House ("Eli the Good"), Matt Bell ("In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods"), Roxane Gay ("Ayiti"), Kyle Minor (“In the Devil’s Territory”), and more.

In future seasons, we will widen the net to include occasional emerging writers and writers who are primarily known for their work in another genre or medium (songwriters, for example, or playwrights).

We want Unbound to be where you discover your next favorite author.

Who We Are:

“Unbound” is produced by WFPL’s arts and humanities reporter Erin Keane (see her Kickstarter backing history here) with the support of WFPL editorial director Gabe Bullard and our amazing intern, Elizabeth Spencer. Keane holds an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University and is the author of two collections of poetry. She teaches part-time in an MFA program, is co-writing a play about Phil Collins, and can’t get enough of interdisciplinary projects like “Unbound.”