Summer Salon: Vibe Check Live Podcast Recording - FINE ARTS WORK CENTER in Provincetown

Summer Salons

Vibe Check Podcast:
A Live Recording with
Saeed Jones, Brandon Sharp, and Zach Stafford

Friday, May 23, 2025
5 – 7 p.m.

About Vibe Check Podcast

A weekly podcast where journalist and podcaster Sam Sanders (Into It, formerly NPR’s It’s Been a Minute), writer Saeed Jones (How We Fight for Our Lives), and journalist and Tony Award-winning producer Zach Stafford (formerly The Advocate, A Strange Loop) make sense of what’s going on in news and culture – and how it all feels. Vibe Check is your favorite group chat, come to life.

About Our Hosts

Saeed Jones is an essential author as well as a powerful voice in the world of literary activism, and his writing often engages the questions and nuances of identity. He has shaped his platform into a tool for social awareness, breakthroughs and connections with his no-holds-barred personality and unforgettable voice. Vibe Check, the weekly news and culture podcast he hosts with Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford, has been lauded as one of the Best Podcasts of the Year by The New York Times, Vogue, and CBC Radio.

Saeed was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. His debut poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was awarded the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.

In 2019, Saeed released his highly anticipated memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives. The memoir won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, a 2020 Lambda Literary Award, as well as a 2020 Stonewall Book Award.

His most recent collection, Alive at the End of the World, was published in 2022 and awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. The collection was also a finalist for both the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.

Brandon Sharp is the founder of Agenda Management & Production. After graduating from Yale with a degree in Political Science, Brandon worked as an analyst for Barclays in New York before deciding to work for President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. He worked in the Chicago headquarters on the Advance desk, which planed all the logistics for hundreds of campaign events, concerts and rallies, engaging artists from Bruce Springsteen to Jay-Z. In 2018, Brandon began working in ICM’s political division, representing and servicing clients and projects in the politics, advocacy, and activism space before creating Agenda Management & Production in 2020. Agenda represents talent and produces content that leans into purpose. He was a producer on Spotify’s ABOLITION X podcast, and is currently an Executive Producer on Stitcher/Sirius XM’s podcast VIBE CHECK.

Zach Stafford is an award-winning journalist, editor, and Tony award-winning producer of the Broadway musical A STRANGE LOOP. He currently cohosts Vibe Check from Stitcher Podcasts, with Saeed Jones and Sam Sanders.

Prior to these roles, he was the co-host of the Buzzfeed News’ morning show AM to DM and editor-in-chief of The Advocate. He served as the chief content officer of Grindr and editor-in-chief of INTO, the former LGBTQ digital magazine. He has also served as the editor-at-large of Out and was a journalist at The Guardian where his reporting on police brutality won numerous awards.

Zach regularly provides commentary on radio and podcasts and has appeared on the BBC, CNN and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. He is also the co-editor of the book Boys, An Anthology and executive producer/host of the documentary Boystown.

In 2019, he was named to the Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 and was listed as one of the 100 most influential living African Americans by The Root.

Proceeds from these paid events ensure that the Fine Arts Work Center is able to provide free arts and culture events for the Outer Cape Cod community year round.