In this episode, award-winning crime writer Ed Lin takes us from his childhood growing up in his family’s Jersey Shore ‘hot sheet’ motel to becoming a journalist and the first author ever to win three Asian American Literary Awards.

We talk about the strange path from feeling like an outsider to finding your voice, and how Ed learned to channel self-doubt into fiction. Along the way, he shares why humor matters, even in the darkest stories, and how the funniest moments can sometimes make the hardest truths land.

From his literary debut, Waylaid, to his Robert Chow crime novels set in 1970s Manhattan Chinatown, to his acclaimed Taipei Night Market series, Ed has built a career around telling stories that are both entertaining and deeply observant. His latest novel, The Dead Can’t Make a Living, explores immigration, class, migrant labor, and the hidden hierarchies that shape our lives, all through the lens of a gripping crime story.

Ed shares how his years in journalism taught him to pay attention to the details people overlook, and why he believes every great crime novel is, at heart, a social novel. It’s a conversation full of laughs, insight, and the reminder that sometimes the things that make us feel most like imposters are also the things that give us our unique perspective.

This week on Imposter Hour, Liz and Greg sit down with Danielle Girard to talk about perspective, how it shapes our writing, our ambition, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are allowed to be.

Danielle joins us on the heels of her new novel, Pinky Swear, and opens up about what it meant to write into a new genre while navigating personal upheaval. We explore the creative risk of stepping outside reader expectations, the complexity of female rage and empathy on the page, and the strange truth that success does not inoculate anyone against imposter syndrome.

This episode is about reinvention, creative courage, and the quiet power of shifting your perspective.

Liz and Greg press pause to look back on sixty conversations that turned a small side project into a creative lifeline. They talk honestly about what the show became, the strange math of the writing life, and how community keeps the doubt from taking over. It’s a soft landing, not a goodbye, full of gratitude for the guests, the listeners, and the chance to keep talking about the beautiful mess of making things.