Black Writers Read: Recent Episodes
Nicole M. Young-Martin
Black Writers Read showcases, celebrates, and honors the words, work, and traditions of Black writers from across the country, across genres, across experiences, and across the African Diaspora. This podcast series is produced and hosted by performance poet, playwright, events curator, and educator Nicole M. Young-Martin. Find us on Instagram: @blackwritersread. Find Nicole on Instagram: @coco_penexplore.
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This episode features our conversation with Damon Moore, which was live-streamed on October 17, 2025 as a part of our National Black Poetry Day marathon. We talked about his debut poetry collection, Anthems for an American Apocalypse Volume One: Poems for Recitation and Resuscitation.
Bridging psychology and prophecy, Damon Moore crafts mythic verse that prods you into awakening. Anthems of the American Apocalypse Volume One burns with themes of identity, culture, and rebirth.
A must-read for anyone who knows America is cracked and still wants to build something sacred from the ruins. In this genre-defying spoken-word poetry collection informed by ancestral wisdom, collective shadow work, and lived experience, Damon Moore fuses prophecy and poetry into a vision for what comes after collapse. He exposes the cultural rot of the American empire and deconstructs the machinery of its identity, systemic oppression, and spiritual fragmentation. These poems move through history, psychology, and ancestry with precision and passion.
Published in August of 2025, Anthems of the American Apocalypse Volume One is a vital offering for thinkers, artists, and seekers longing to reclaim soul in a soulless age.
This very eye-opening and compelling poetry collection is available for purchase on Amazon: https://a.co/d/986XdtJ
Find Damon on Instagram and TikTok at iamdamonmoore.
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This episode features our conversation with self-help author, the Honorable Tiffany D. Tilley, which was live-streamed on October 14, 2025.
Tiffany D. Tilley is an author, leader, advocate, and luminary from Detroit with a multi-faceted background that often intersects across education, communications, government, real estate development, community and economic development, and nonprofit leadership. A dedicated public servant, she was elected to the Michigan State Board of Education in 2018 with nearly 1.8 million votes and later ran for Congress in Michigan’s 10th District.
Passionate about literacy, equity, Early Childhood Education, mental health, foster youth, and education reform. Tilley has been a tireless advocate both locally and nationally. She has fought for social justice, amplifying community voices and advancing grassroots initiatives that create meaningful change. As a State Board Member, she has worked to dismantle systemic barriers in education and beyond. Through her development and nonprofit leadership, she has secured approximately $20 million in resources for communities across Southeastern Michigan.
Tilley holds an MBA from the University of Detroit Mercy and has received global leadership training from C-Suite executives and government leaders in Italy, China, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Costa Rica. Her greatest role is being a mother of two, inspiring change through leadership and service.
During our conversation, we chatted about Tiffany’s Know Thyself Book Series. Finding strength through reflection, purpose through healing, and power through authenticity, the Know Thyself Book Series includes four books: The Journey to Self-Empowerment, Virtues of Leadership, Getting Over the Hump: A Voyage to the Top, and Rebirth. This series is more than books, it’s a movement to inspire self-discovery, emotional resilience, self-determination, and positive transformation.
Purchase the Know Thyself book series: https://www.phoenixrisingpublishingcompany.com/know-thyself-book-
series/know-thyself-book-series
Find Tiffany on Instagram: @thriveandrisewithtiffany
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This episode features our conversation with Dr. Shonda Buchanan, which was live-streamed on September 14, 2025. We talked about her recent poetry collection, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone and her debut memoir, Black Indian.
Kalamazoo, Michigan native Dr. Shonda Buchanan is a three-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Oxfam Ambassador and a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and PEN America Mentor. An Associate Professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University and Alma College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, Shonda is the author of three collections of poetry, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country as well as the award-winning memoir, Black Indian, chosen by PBS NewsHour as a “Top 20 books to read to learn about institutional racism.”
Former Board President for Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, and Board member of the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival and the Kalamazoo Arts Council, Shonda has published in The Mississippi Review, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, LA Times Magazine, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, Indian Country Today, Red Ink Journal, LA Parents Magazine and freelanced for the International Review of African American Art, Westways, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Daily Press and Sisters of AARP. Shonda’s forthcoming essay collection, Children of the Mixed Blood Trail, explores mixed-race migration in North America. An English Language Specialist with the Department of State, Shonda is currently shopping a Black Lives Matter book of poetry, America’s Bloodflowers: Poems, as well as Artificial Earth: Poems and Essays, about the first founding mixed-race “settlers” of Los Angeles and California Indians.
To learn more about Dr. Buchanan, please visit shondabuchanan.com.
Follow Shonda Buchanan on Instagram: @shondabuchanan
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This episode features our conversation with Shannon Luders-Manuel, which waslive-streamed on September 7, 2025. We welcomed Shannon back to the virtual platform to talk about her debut memoir, The One Who Loves You.
Shannon Luders-Manuel is the author of the memoir, The One Who Loves You: A Memoir of Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World, published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press which was released in February of 2025. Shannon holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written extensively about race, with bylines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. In 2015, she wrote the viral For Harriet essay “What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives.” Luders-Manuel presented her master’s thesis at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in Chicago in 2012 and was a featured writer at the 2014 Mixed Remixed Festival in Los Angeles. She performs sensitivity reads for major publishers, providing feedback on Black and mixed-race characters and issues.
To learn more about Shannon, please visit shannonludersmanuel.com.
Purchase your copy of The One Who Loves You today via Black Writers Read's Bookshop link.
Check out the first time Shannon was on the virtual platform: Season One Episode Seven
Find Shannon on Instagram: @shannon_luders_manuel
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Black Writers Read has reached its sixth season! Check out this trailer to get a sneak peek of the upcoming season.
Conversations here on Black Writers Read question our own subjectivities as creatives, justify our choices as writers, acknowledge our growths, chiseling through barriers so that others behind us don’t face the same challenges and of course, remaining hopeful in our constantly shifting world - one that continues to erase our histories, representations, and identities. Black storytellers still stand strong for the culture.
Join us LIVE on Sunday, September 7 at 3 p.m. ET | 12 p.m. PT on the live broadcast on YouTube for our Season Six premiere.
Visit us online at https://blackwritersread.com/ to learn more about the virtual platform.
Support Black Writers Read on Patreon.
Check out past episodes on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music.
Thanks again for your support and for ensuring that Black writers continue to matter.
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This episode features our conversation with Arriel Vinson, which was live-streamed on May 24, 2025. We chatted about her debut young adult (YA) novel in verse, Under the Neon Lights(G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, June 3. 2025).
Arriel Vinson is a Reese's Book Club LitUp Fellow and Midwesterner who writes about being young, Black, and in search of freedom. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and others. Arriel is a Tin House YA Scholar, Highlights Foundation scholarship recipient, and 2020 Walter Grant recipient.
In this sparkling and heartfelt debut YA novel in verse, a young Black girl discovers first love, self-worth, and the power of a good skate. Perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo and Joya Goffney.
You can connect with her on social media at @arriwrites and find her work at arriwrites.com.
Purchase your copy of Under the Neon Lights via Black Writers Read's Bookshop link to support both the podcast and independent bookstores! CLICK HERE
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This episode features our conversation with Laura Pegram, founding editor of The Kweli Journal, to chat about Sing the Truth: The Kweli Journal Short Story Collection, an anthology published in celebration of their 15th anniversary, which was live-streamed on May 17, 2025.
Hailed as “The Paris Review of BIPOC literature,” The Kweli Journal has been a launching pad for many of today’s most celebrated writers. Kweli—“truth” in Swahili—marks its fifteenth anniversary with this luminous collection edited by founder Laura Pegram. These vivid narratives explore the devastation of leaving home and the struggle to adapt to reimagined lives, lost loves, distant families, and buried pasts, deepening our understanding of the human experience.
Featuring works from acclaimed authors Naima Coster, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Daphne Palasi Andreades, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and others, with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat, this anthology stands as a testament to voices too often overlooked in contemporary literature. Readers will encounter narratives that explore memory, identity, culture, and the ways in which words transcend language to become instruments of power and resilience. In the evocative words of the anthology: “So come, sit with us on the bank and listen to our music.”
Kweli means “truth” in Swahili. Under the direction of founding editor, Laura Pegram since 2009, the Kweli Journal’s mission is to nurture emerging BIPOC writers that “sing the truth”. With a quarterly online literary journal, year-long writer fellowships, multi-session workshops, writing retreats, individualized editing, an annual writers’ conference and international festival, Kweli invests in the artistic and professional growth of emerging authors, nationally and internationally. Kweli Journal continues to contribute to a world where the narratives being told reflect the truth of our histories and the possibilities of our future.
To learn more about the Kweli Journal, please visit their website at kwelijournal.org. To purchase your copy of Sing the Truth, please visit https://bookshop.org/shop/blackwritersread. By purchasing your books via this Bookshop link, you’re supporting Independent booksellers and Black Writers Read.
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This episode features our conversation with Eden Royce (Southern Gothic.), which was live-streamed on May 3, 2025.
Eden Royce is a writer from Charleston, South Carolina now living in Southeast England. She is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and a Bram Stoker Award nominee for her adult short fiction, which has appeared in various print and online magazines. Her debut middle-grade novel, ROOT MAGIC is a Walter Award Honoree, a Nebula Award finalist, a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner, and an Ignyte award winner for outstanding children’s literature. Her third middle-grade novel, THE CREEPENING OF DOGWOOD HOUSE, is a Walter Award Honoree, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, and a Bram Stoker Award Nominee. She loves tea, coffee, bookstores, and roller skating – not always in that order.
During this episode, Eden read from her short story, "For Southern Girls When the Zodiac Ain't Near Enough" originally published in Apex Magazine issue #111 in 2018. We also had an opportunity to chat about her middle grade fiction novels including ROOT MAGIC and THE CREEPENING OF DOGWOOD HOUSE along with her forthcoming adult novella, PSYCHOPOMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE which is scheduled for release later this year in October. Pre-order your copy of PSYCHOPOMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE TODAY!
Congratulations to Eden for THE CREEPENING OF DOGWOOD HOUSE being nominated for an Ignyte Award in the Outstanding Middle Grade category and HOLLOW TONGUEfor being nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award!
To learn more about Eden and her body of work, please visit edenroyce.com.
Find Eden Royce on Instagram: @edenroycebooks
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This episode features our conversation with Essie Chambers, which was live-streamed on April 22, 2025.
Essie Chambers is an award-winning author and producer. Her debut novel, Swift River—a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club pick—won the 2024 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, Elle, and others. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, The Libby Awards, the New England Book Awards and the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year. She received an Honor Fiction award from The Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Essie started her career as a television executive at Nickelodeon/The N and BET before becoming an independent producer and filmmaker. She went on to produce the critically acclaimed PBS documentary, The New Public, and the Sundance Award–winning, Oscar-shortlisted documentary Descendant, which was released by the Obamas’ Higher Ground production company and Netflix in 2022.
She earned her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she’s about to get started on book #2.
During our conversation, we talked about Swift River.
Learn more about Essie and her body of work: https://essiechambers.com/
During the episode, I reference an interview between Harriette Cole and Essie Chambers. Watch this interview here: Dreamleapers with Harriette Cole
Find Essie on Instagram: @essiejchambers
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This episode features our conversation with Brother’s Keeper Poetry Theater Ensemble, which was live-streamed on April 12, 2025.
Since 2013, Brother’s Keeper Poetry Theater Ensemble has been a beacon of hope and transformation, weaving together words, emotions, and stories to create powerful theatrical performances that resonate deeply with their audiences. The group blends elements of poetry, spoken word, theatre and music to create a unique performance which is not only entertaining and educational, but also soulful.
Passionate about fostering diversity and social change, Brother's Keeper has taken their craft into diverse spaces, performing at city halls, job corps programs, corporate offices seeking to enhance their DEI initiatives, and young adult substance abuse centers. With every stage they grace, they aim to spark dialogue, challenge perceptions, and encourage healing through the transformative power of art. Brother's Keeper has received citations of merit from the City Hall in the cities of: East Providence, Providence and Pawtucket Rhode Island.
Check out their newly released spoken word album, Father Figures, now available on Apple Music/iTunes, Amazon Music, and YouTube.
This episode of Black Writers Read is presented in collaboration with the Florence Poetry Carnival.
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This episode features our conversation with Nzima Hutchings (poetry. prose.), the 2023-2025 Poet Laureate for Enfield, Connecticut, which was livestreamed on April 7, 2025 to kick-off National Poetry Month.
An award-winning author, editor, educator, and workshop facilitator, Nzima Hutchings has worked with various organizations including Trinity Health of New England, Saint Francis Hospital Family Advocacy Center, Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence, Asnuntuck Community College, Long Wharf Theatre, Nuyorican Poets Café, Our Piece of the Pie, Massachusetts Women of Color, and Mount Holyoke College. Nzima serves on several boards of directors including for the Enfield Cultural Art Commissions, Ujima African American, and A Queen’s Narrative. She is the curator and host of Nzima's Poetry Café Show. show on Cox Public Access Studios which airs in Connecticut and Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She is also a co-founder off Hartford's L.I.T. with T'challa Williams who was interviewed on the podcast back in February of 2025. Nzima is a contributor to Heavy is the Crown, an anthology published by A Queen's Narrative - I served as the editor and Nzima read an excerpt of her poem during the bonus episode announcing the book.
To purchase books written by Nzima, visit her Amazon link here.
To listen to the bonus episode on the Heavy is the Crown anthology: Apple Podcasts; Spotify
Find Nzima on Instagram: @follownzima
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This episode features our conversation with contemporary romance author, Reese Ryan, which was live-streamed on March 23, 2025.
Award-winning author Reese Ryan writes sexy, emotional, “grown folks” romantic fiction. Her characters find love while navigating career crises and family drama. The two-time recipient of the Donna Hill Breakout Author Award is an advocate for the romance genre and diversity in fiction. Reese’s books have been featured on Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, and BookRiot.
Our chat centered around The Love & Music Suite which includes Spin the Block, Never the Right Time, and More Than Friends. The fourth book of the series, When It Comes to You, is due for release this summer on June 20.
The Love & Music Series follows the music industry celebrity alumni of Peachtree School of the Arts in Atlanta as they reconnect to save their old school. Friendships are formed and love connections are re-ignited as they navigate the industry and take their careers to new heights.
To learn more about Reese and her work, please visit reeseryan.com.
During our conversation, we also talked about the Black Romance Book Fest. Learn more about this event by visiting https://blackromancebookfest.com/.
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This episode features our conversation with nonfiction, business, and Christian Self-Help author, LaTanya Orr, which was live-streamed on March 15, 2025.
Brand strategist, certified life coach and visual storyteller, LaTanya Orr, strategically equips entrepreneurs, corporate executives and ministry leaders with award-winning concepts that showcase their brand brilliance with intention and maximum impact. With over two decades in marketing, public relations, and design, LaTanya shapes brand identities through creative strategies and impactful design. As the author of Strike A Pose: 7 Red Carpet Strategies Every Entrepreneurial Woman Must Have, she empowers career women to excel. Her upcoming book, FoundHER, Finding Me: How a Shift in Focus Reveals Your Extraordinary, guides women to thrive at the highest levels. Regarded as an “Entrepreneurial Midwife”, LaTanya fosters disruption in women's business through her Chicago-based, women's entrepreneurial network, The FoundHERS Suite. LaTanya holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from Davenport University.
To learn more about LaTanya and her work, please visit www.thefoundherssuite.com.
During the introduction, I mentioned the name of Michelle May, the amazing creative professionals' coach that brought LaTanya and I together. Michelle has helped me to amplify my brand as a creative professional and to streamline my workflow. To learn more about her and her services, visit https://www.ammayassociates.com/coachingmichelle.
Find LaTanya on Instagram: @latanyaorr
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This episode features our conversation with Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which was live-streamed on March 8, 2025, the day nationally recognized as International Women’s Day. We talked about her book, Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024).
Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.
Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.
Winnter of the 2024 Best Indie Book Award in Non-Fiction: History, Politics, and Social Sciences, Black Woman on Board offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, uncovering the vital role Black women educational leaders have played in ensuring access and equity for all.
Dr. Donna J. Nicol is the Associate Dean for Personnel and Curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach (CSULB).
To learn more about Dr. Nicol and her work, please visit donnajnicol.com.
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This episode features our conversation with Victoria Christopher Murray, which was live-streamed on March 1, 2025.
Victoria Christopher Murray is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian, a Good Morning America book club pick, and The First Ladies, Target’s 2023 Book of the Year, both of which she coauthored with Marie Benedict. She is a NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.
Our conversation centered around Victoria’s latest historical fiction novel, Harlem Rhapsody (February 4, 2025, Berkley).
In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.
W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.
When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.
Congratulations to Victoria and Harlem Rhapsody for being chosen as the March read for the Club Calvi Book Club! Watch Victoria's interview about this month's read.
To learn more about Victoria and her expansive body of work, please visit her website at victoriachristophermurray.com.
Special thanks to Wendy Healey of Ventfort Hall Gilded Age Mansion and Museum and Shawn Matel from Our Culture Is Beautiful (CT) for making this connection happen.
Find Victoria on Instagram: @victoriachristophermurray
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This episode features our conversation with Roya Marsh, which was live-streamed on February 3, 2025.
Bronx, New York native, Roya Marsh is a poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the author of dayliGht, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and SAVINGS TIME (MCDXFSG). Roya works feverishly toward Queer liberation and dismantling white supremacy. She is the co-founder of the Bronx Poet Laureate, a PEN America Emerging Voices Mentor, Lambda Literary faculty and the awardee of the Lotos Foundation Prize for Poetry and 2024 Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant from Bronx Council on the Arts.
Roya’s work has been featured widely including, The Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, the Village Voice, Nylon Magazine, Huffington Post, The Root, Button Poetry, BAM, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The Apollo Theater, Lexus Verses and Flow, On One with Angela Rye, BET and The BreakBeat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket 2018).
This episode’s conversation centered around her recently released poetry collection, savings time, which hit bookshelves on February 4, 2025.
The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time, wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention.
In poems flitting between breathless prose and measured lyricism, Marsh contemplates the contradictions and challenges of Black life in America, tackling everything from police brutality and urban gentrification to queer identity, presidential elections, and pop culture, all while calling for a world where self-care, especially for Black women, is not just encouraged but mandated. “no one told the Black girl,” she writes, “‘see you later’ was a prayer / begging us survive our own erasure.”
As unforgettable on the page as when recited in Marsh’s legendary spoken-word performances, the poems in savings time are focused on both revolution and self-love, at once holding society accountable for its exploitation of Black life and honoring the joy of persisting nonetheless.
Purchase your copy of savings time TODAY: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615796/savingstime/
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This episode features our conversation with Justin Haynes, which was live-streamed on January 18, 2025.
Justin Haynes is a fiction writer originally from the Caribbean. His work has been supported by various residencies and fellowships, including from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Tin House Summer Workshop. His writing has been published in various literary magazines and journals, including Caribbean Quarterly and SX Salon|Small Axe Project. Haynes lives in Atlanta and teaches English and creative writing at Oglethorpe University.
During this episode, we chatted about Justin’s recently released novel, Ibis (Overlook Press, February 11, 2025).
A bold, witty, magical new voice in fiction, Justin Haynes's Ibis weaves a cross-generational Caribbean story of migration, superstition, and a search for family in his debut novel.
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions. New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Now, skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas. In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.
With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.
To learn more about Justin and his work, please visit his website at justinhayneswriter.com.
Purchase your copy of Ibis today: https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/ibis
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This episode features our conversation with T’challa Williams, which was live-streamed on January 11, 2025.
Through love, marriage, motherhood and loss, T’challa Williams' voice has matured and narrated her experiences in a way that produced seven collections of poetry over the last five years. In addition to poetry, she shares her most intimate life experiences in anthologies. The most recent contribution with A Queen’s Narrative for their anthology, Heavy is The Crown, where she remembers the recent loss of her grandmother. Many of you may remember T’challa from the special episode of Black Writers Read upon the release of this anthology.
Her powerful words combine with an open heart to paint a boldly compassionate picture of The Lover & The Revolutionary. As a creative advocate she tackles the hard issues head on and works through her craft to empower the voiceless and stay on the back of injustice. A member of Ruby’s Realm Production company, she reprises her character Nessa twice each year. The latest live production, Mind Your Business, can be found on Nutmeg TV on YouTube. Using her poetry, workshops and presence, T’challa works to shine a light on advocacy and create a vital impact within her community. As Executive Co-Founder of the organization Hartford’s L.I.T.; Greater Hartford Arts Council Board member; member of the Resident Community Advisor Council for the North Hartford Ascend Pipeline; T’challa works with her community and supports local artists.
During this episode, T’challa shared excerpts from her fourth poetry collection, Passions…released (2022). We also had a chance to chat about her latest poetry collection, Captured Thoughts. Released in June of 2024, Captured Thoughts is a beautifully written tribute in memory of her grandmother who we had an opportunity to discuss her influence on T’challa’s work during our chat.
Passions, released... is a collection of pieces from within a poet that tie love, lust and desire into words that tell stories of relationships past and present. Connections of friendships and romance and family. Old connections and new ones, all tied into our passions of life. May you find words that touch your heart and inspire you to once again feel passion, compassion and peace. May peace remind you, that you are full of love.
Her books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Find T'challa on Instagram: @challarock
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This episode features our conversation with Jennifer Janell (spicy women's fiction.), which was live-streamed on December 21, 2024.
Jennifer Janell is a new women's fiction author who lives in San Antonio, Texas. She has a passion for writing spicy stories that resonate with readers, explore relationships, and offer an escape from everyday life. Her love for writing about flawed characters inspired her first book series. The Lee Series includes The Year of Lee(available as a free e-book), For the Love of Lee, and the upcoming The Betrayal of Lee(now available for pre-order). These stories depict the changes a woman goes through when navigating the complex journey of single life, love, loss, marriage, and motherhood. Jennifer’s goal is to write relatable but complex characters that people love. Her debut book, For the Love of Lee, was awarded second place for women’s fiction in the fall 2024 Book Fest awards. Jennifer is a wife, mother of three, and a registered nurse for over 20 years. She also has a master’s degree in nursing informatics.
On this episode, we talked about The Lee Series and chatted in-depth about the second book of the series, For the Love of Lee.
After a year of masking childhood traumas with sex, alcohol, and self-destruction, Leesha Roberts is ready to embark on a journey that will break her free from the toxicity that has been holding her back from true love.
Eliminating useless lovers is first on the list …
She bids farewell to the older, irresistible but very married Mike and the younger, eager-to-please Roy, but letting them go is not easy and proves to be more of a detox than a graceful exit. Determined to rebuild herself, Leesha embraces counseling, and even considers confronting her turbulent past with her mother. But just as her self-love journey gains momentum, fate throws a curveball when Francine, a prospective resident at the assistant living facility Leesha manages, introduces her to her grandson, Karl, the embodiment of every woman’s desire. Karl seems to be the perfect match, but there’s just one thing holding Leesha back—his race.
Clumsily navigating the pitfalls of adulting, Leesha leans on her steadfast friend, Johnathon … until his own troubles lead him away. Now facing life without his support, Leesha grapples with the risk of falling into yet another toxic relationship. Can she preserve her path to a better life, trusting that history won’t repeat itself with Karl?
Embrace Leesha’s poignant journey of self-discovery, love, and resilience in this spicy Women’s Fiction novel. For the Love of Lee was released in July of 2024.
To learn more about Jennifer and her work AND to purchase your copy of For the Love of Lee, please visit jenniferjanell.com.
Find Jennifer Janell on Instagram: @jenniferjanellauthor
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This episode features our conversation with Crystal Senter-Brown, which was live-streamed on December 14, 2024.
Crystal Senter-Brown's life's purpose can be summed up in one sentence: Empowering Women and Children. And Crystal lives her purpose every single day, whether it is by publishing books that teach children the importance of being kind to others, leading writing workshops in the community, speaking at local schools or leading the career center at Bay Path University. She has authored 12 books to date and is currently working on her 13th. One of her novels ("The Rhythm in Blue") was turned into a feature film and won several awards at film festivals around the world. Crystal is the recipient of the BusinessWest Difference Maker Award for her work empowering and inspiring women and young girls. She is certified as a Gallup strengths career coach, and recently began her work to earn her doctorate in Education. Married to the love of her life for almost 25 years, she is also a mother and dog mom.
During this episode, Crystal shared excerpts from her second poetry collection, But She Has Such a Pretty Face (2014). Here’s what Crystal offers about But She Has Such a Pretty Face: "Every time someone would say to me: "But you have such a pretty face" I would cringe and think: But what about the Rest of me? "But you have such a pretty face" tells my story through a series of 43 poems. I wrote about my childhood in Morristown, Tn (Home, Ella's tambourine, That Time When my Brother Jerome was Evel Kneivel), marriage (Before dawn, Loving outloud), love (Lucky Jeans, Flirt) motherhood (for Aj at Seventeen, First Bath), relationships (Twenty-first morning, Monsters in the Closet), family (Welcome Home, The Droopy-Boob Haiku), the importance of fatherhood (The Luckiest Girl on Earth, Disposable Daddy, When everything was new) to learning to love my body at Every size (Chunk, Beautiful Me). I hope that no matter who you are, you'll find a few poems you can relate to. Whether you are a mother, wife, father, sister, poet, college student, mess-talker, best friend or just a girl with more than a pretty face, I hope you enjoy the read!"
To learn more about Crystal and her expansive body of work, please visit crystalsenterbrown.com.
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This episode features our conversation with Dr. DuEwa Frazier, which was live-streamed on December 7, 2024.
Dr. DuEwa Frazier is an award-winning author, poet, writer, editor, professor, creative entrepreneur, keynote speaker, arts and education leader, and digital creator. She is the editor of Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts (Routledge, 2024). DuEwa's writing focuses on contemporary education issues, arts and culture, hip - hop culture, women's interest, and opinion. Her TEDx Talk, “Word is Bond,” was given in 2019. She has produced work in multiple areas in connection to writing, arts, and education management. Her research and work in the education field has focused on culturally responsive pedagogies, educational leadership, professional development, contemporary education issues, coaching and mentoring, arts and education initiatives, and student achievement.
She is the author of several volumes of poetry and books for young readers including Shedding Light From My Journeys, Stardust Tracks on a Road, Ten Marbles and a Bag to Put Them In, Goddess Under the Bridge: Poems, Deanne in the Middle, Quincy Rules, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets & Emcees, and Baby Ray's Old School vs. New School Hip-Hop Party. She is the founding publisher of Lit Noire Publishing and creator of Nerdacity Podcast and Afrofutures Pod.
Featured in this episode is the recently released anthology, Introduction to Afrofuturism: A Mixtape in Black Literature & Arts and DuEwa’s expansive body of work as a writer, performer, editor, educator, and scholar.
Introduction to Afrofuturism delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black literature, film, and music. From Afrofuturism’s origins to the present, this critical volume features scholarly works, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction which illuminates on the contributions of notable Afrofuturists such as Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okorafor, Saul Williams, Prince, and more. The volume highlights the impact of films such as Black Panther (2018, 2022), The Woman King (2022), and They Cloned Tyrone (2023) and covers a variety of essential topics giving students a comprehensive view of the legacy of storytelling and the tradition of “remixing” in Black literature and arts. This volume makes connections across academic subject areas and is an engaging reader for pop culture and media film studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Black and Africana studies, hip-hop studies, creative writing, and composition and rhetoric.
To learn more about DuEwa and her expansive canon of work, please visit www.duewaworld.com.
Check out Nerdacity on Apple Podcasts
Check out Afrofutures Pod on YouTube
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This episode features our conversation with Sabin Prentis Duncan, which was live-streamed on December 7, 2024.
Dr. Sabin Prentis Duncan is a husband, father, educator, and creator of Literary Soul Food. He holds an Executive Masters from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Doctorate and Specialist degrees from Eastern Michigan University, and Masters and Bachelor degrees from Hampton University. He writes fiction & Hip Hop essays as Sabin Prentis and non-fiction as Sabin Duncan.
During our conversation, we took a deep dive into his award-winning novel, DANCE WITH MY FATHER, which is the third and last book of the Love & Family Trilogy Series.
Throughout his life, Cleveland Robeson has shouldered life's challenges and traumas without asking for help. Whether it is because of his age, his gender, or because he is black, he has survived by putting his head down, plowing ahead, and never acknowledging the well-being of his mental health. But when he suggests therapy for his wife, what follows could change their marriage and his life. Published by Fielding Books in 2022, DANCE WITH MY FATHER is the recipient of the Best Fiction for Self-Publishing EBook by the Black Caucus of American Librarian Association!
To learn more about Sabin and his expansive canon of work, please visit fieldingbooks.com.
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This episode features our conversation with Ebony Aya, which was live-streamed on November 23, 2024. During our chat, we talked about her latest book, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness.
Ebony Aya works at Macalester College as a Program Manager for the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching. She is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Minnesota in Curriculum and Instruction, with minors in Culture and Teaching and African American and African Studies. In her work, she focuses on the experience of Black women in higher education and centering African ways of knowing. Additionally, she is the founder of the Aya Collective, a space that centers the expertise and experience of Black women in writing and is the author of published books, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness and Incomplete Stories: On Loss, Love, and Hope, and recently launched the Aya Collective’s second anthology, Finding the Voice Within’.
Imagine what can happen when the sacred texts that we have turned to for spiritual nourishment and direction are places of refuge. Imagine the possibilities of staring into these texts we have meditated on from our youth up, to see ourselves reflected within the narratives in such a way that leaves us feeling simultaneously inspired and challenged, without guilt or shame. Published in July of 2024, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness is a text that allows us to imagine, giving us space to think through what we have learned about the biblical concept of Eve and the situatedness of Black womanhood. The stories found within these pages ensure a pathway towards a deepened self-consciousness that ultimately leads to liberation.
To learn more about Ebony, her work, and to purchase her books, please visit ayamediapublishingllc.com.
To learn more about the Aya Collective, please visit ayacollectivemn.com
Find Ebony and the Aya Collective on Instagram: @ayacollectivemn
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This episode features our conversation with Brianna Wheeler, which was live-streamed on November 16, 2024.
Brianna Wheeler covers cannabis, culture, food, film, parenting and local politics for print and web. She served as host, writer and producer of the Willamette Week news podcast, and is a frequent contributor to Portland City Cast. Her creative nonfiction work has appeared in The Nasiona, Midnight and Indigo, and has been featured in Medium’s Human Parts newsletter. Her first book, Altogether Different: A Memoir about Identity, Inheritance, and the Raid that Started the Civil War was published by Korza Books in 2023.
If you could choose between being Black and being white, what would you do?
As a child, Brianna Wheeler, the mixed-race descendant of Dangerfield Newby-first of John Brown's raiders to die at Harpers Ferry in their bid to end slavery-unconsciously chose whiteness, unaware that she had the choice at all. As an adult, following the deaths of her mother and grandmother, Brianna struggled with her own identity, convinced that her lasting legacy would be the rejection of her own Blackness.
Then, in 2020, a racial reckoning rekindled her connection to both her heritage and her grandmother's lifelong work of preserving the stories of Dangerfield and the rest of her ancestors, leading Brianna to confront both long-held family dynamics and her own place in history-from a new perspective.
A unique blend of memoir, creative nonfiction and illustration, Altogether Different untangles the complex connection between the stories we tell ourselves and the histories preserved for us.
To learn more about Brianna, please visit briannawheeler.com.
Find Brianna on Instagram: @briyonceflipy
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This episode features our conversation with Nathan Alexander Moore (Speculative Fiction. Poetry. Nonfiction. Critical Theory.), which was live-streamed on November 2, 2024.
Nathan Alexander Moore (she, they) is a Black nonbinary transfemme writer, cultural theorist, and educator. Currently she is the Assistant Professor of Black Trans and Queer Studies in the Department of Women & Gender Studies at University of Colorado Boulder. Her research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions, and temporality. Their previous work has been published TransNarratives: Scholarly and Creative Works on Transgender Experience, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Their fiction was a Semifinalist for the 2021 Screencraft Cinematic Book Competition, as well as shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. They were also a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry. Her debut fiction collection, THE RUPTURE FILES (2024), is available from Hajar Press.
Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.
At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection, THE RUPTURE FILES, tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.
To learn more about Nathan Alexander Moore and her body of work, please visit nathanalexandermoore.com.
Find Nathan on Instagram: @sumthingmoore
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This episode features our conversation with Adrian Burks, which was live-streamed on October 20, 2024.
Adrian Burks is a director, writer, actor and producer. An ex-collegiate athlete originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Adrian has been a filmmaker in Los Angeles for over a decade. He has appeared in movies such as the Academy Award winning WHIPLASH, and the comedic cult classic FIRST PERIOD. Adrian has also appeared in television shows such as CBS: CODE BLACK, and ALL ABOUT LIZZIE. He has written 5 produced short films, has directed three, and is currently in development for a feature film he wrote and plans to direct. Adrian won 6 awards for his film AFTER LAUGHTER in which he co-wrote, co-directed, produced and starred in. He went on to get accepted and won the Sony Pictures and Independent Film Trust creative writing program: He wrote a self-help film guide book, How to Frame Success: A Filmmaker's Guide Book to Vision, Networking, and Cinematic Triumphs (April 2024) and is currently VP of production and development for TigerPig Entertainment.
Dive into the heart of DIY filmmaking with How to Frame Success: A Filmmaker's Guide Book to Vision, Networking, and Cinematic Triumphs. In this comprehensive guide, aspiring filmmakers will discover the essential tools and strategies needed to navigate the dynamic world of filmmaking. From cultivating a clear vision to effectively networking within the industry, each chapter provides practical advice and actionable tips for aspiring filmmakers. Learn how to produce your own films, maximize opportunities at film festivals, and assemble a reliable crew to bring your vision to life on screen. With insights from Academy and Emmy award winning creatives and real world examples, this book is a must-have resource for anyone passionate about filmmaking. Whether you're just starting out or looking to take your career to the next level, "How to Frame Success" will empower you to achieve your dreams.
During the live-streamed broadcast, Adrian shared clips from some of his films. To see those clips and hear us talk about them, be sure to check out the interview on YouTube.
To learn more about Adrian and his body of work, please visit www.adrianburksartist.com.
Find Adrian on Instagram: @adrianburks
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This episode features our conversation with Dr. Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, which was live-streamed on October 19, 2024. We chatted about her recently released poetry collections, For the Girls Who Do Too Much and The Summoning of Black Joy.
Dr. Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman is founder of the 501(c)3 nonprofit, Black Writers for Peace and Social Justice, and the current Poet Laureate of Prince George's County, Maryland. Her creative work as a poet and playwright has been showcased on prestigious stages and platforms, including Washington, DC's John F. Kennedy Center, New York's Apollo Theatre, and Baltimore Theatre Project.
Dr. Ali-Coleman is the author of the poetry collections For the Girls Who Do Too Much (2024), The Summoning of Black Joy (2023), the children's book Mariah's Maracas (2018), and co-editor of Homeschooling Black Children in the US: Theory, Practice, and Popular Culture (2022). Her poetry has been found in numerous publications, including Clarion, The Skinny Journal, and Zora's Den's first two book anthologies. In 2019, she was a Theatre Alliance playwright with work featured in Theatre Alliance's 2020-2021 season.
Dr. Ali-Coleman founded the multidisciplinary arts group Liberated Muse in 2008 and co-founded the national education research group Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars, LLC , during the COVID-19 quarantine in 2020. BFHES has provided vital support to over 3000 families, offering annual teach-ins and workshops.
Dr. Ali-Coleman holds a doctorate in education from Morgan State University, an MA in Mass Communication from Towson University, and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. A recipient of numerous grants and fellowships for her writing, performance, and teaching, her accolades include awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, Prince George's Arts and Humanities Council, and Poets & Writers.
To learn more about Dr. Ali-Coleman and her body of work, please visit http://www.KhadijahAli-Coleman.com.
Find Dr. Ali-Coleman on Instagram: @khadijahonline
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On this episode, we welcomed back Tracy Cross (who first joined us in Season Two) for our conversation on October 5, 2024 to talk about her recently released second book, A Gathering of Weapons.
About A Gathering of Weapons
Nearly four years have passed since the events of Rootwork(the first book of The Conjure Series) and the youngest Conway sister, Pee Wee, is now thirteen years old and on the cusp of magical greatness. Ever since the tragedy of 1889, she's worked tirelessly to practice her Hoodoo and hone her conjure skills so as to right the wrongs done to her family. But as a young Black girl living in the post-Reconstruction era of the segregated South, her growing powers do not go unnoticed. Strange and malevolent forces have descended upon the small Louisiana parish Pee Wee calls home, and she must use her newly acquired conjure skills to fight back. Will she use them for good? Or will she pledge herself to the ghost of a dead Voodoo priestess and the darkness the woman serves in exchange for unlimited power and the promise of generational revenge? A Gathering of Weapons is the second book of The Conjure Series.
About Tracy Cross
Tracy Cross’s debut novel, Rootwork, explored racism, sexism, karmic justice, and the power of family and faith. Her second novel in the series, A Gathering of Weapons (Dark Hart Publishing, 2024). Her work can be found in several anthologies, including Don’t Break the Oath, Black Magick (13 Tales of Darkness, Horror and the Occult)and 99 Tiny Terrors. She has been a recipient of a grant from the Ladies of Horror Fiction and the Horror Writers Association Scholarship from Hell. She lives in Washington, DC, is an active member of the HWA and a huge Prince fan. She also enjoys disco and has an Esty page for her other artistic endeavors.
Learn more about Tracy and her work, please visit tracycrossonline.com.
Find Tracy on Instagram: @tracycrosswrites
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This episode features our conversation from September 28, 2024 with Lori L. Tharps, founder of the Reed, Write & Create platform.
Lori is an award-winning author, journalist and educator. A self-described, storytelling evangelist, Tharps is a recognized voice in the areas of race, identity politics and African-American culture. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Glamour and Essence magazines, among others.
In 2021, Tharps moved with her husband and children to the south of Spain, where she launched Reed, Write & Create, a podcast and platform that celebrates and supports BIPoC stories and storytellers with content, coaching, and community. The Reed, Write, & Create podcast was named Best Literary Podcast by the Black Podcasting Awards in 2023 (Black Writers Read is the recipient of the 2024 Best Literary Podcast Award from the Black Podcasting Awards.
A graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Tharps is the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain, and Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families. Tharps also penned the novel, Substitute Me.
Tharps also works as a book coach and collaborator with celebrities and public figures, and has written four books in this role, including The Redemption of Bobby Love and I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here. Both of these titles began as posts on the popular Humans of New York Instagram feed.
The Reed, Write & Create platform provides multiple opportunities for writers to receive a range of support including the blog, the podcast, and The Sanctuary.
Learn more about Lori, her work and the Reed, Write & Create platform, please visit: ReedWriteandCreate.com.
Find Lori on Instagram: @loriltharps
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This special bonus episode of Black Writers Read is the first episode of Season Eight of Podcasting is the New Kink! which features me as a guest co-host! I was invited by Jasmine Gary to join her on her platform to chat about the novel, The Other Black Girl (Atria, 2021) by Zakiya Delila Harris, and the subsequent television series adaptation (now available to stream on Hulu). Urgent, propulsive, and sharp as a knife, this thriller, Harris's debut novel, is about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.
The Other Black Girl has received multiple accolades including being recognized as a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and A Good Morning America and Read with Marie Claire Book Club Pick and a People Best Book of Summer.It was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Time, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, Marie Claire, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Parade, Goodreads, Fortune, and BBC AND Named a Best Book of 2021 by Time, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar, and NPR. This book was and remains a popular read, which is why it was optioned and adapted into a television series.
Podcasting Is the New Kink! is a space for Black women to get inspiration and insight! Join host, Jasmine Gary (she/her), best known as Pink Lady, as she interviews wellness and healing professionals and reviews television adaptations of novels written by Black women. Learn to be your best and favorite self, and think more critically about media and society.
Find Jasmine on Instagram: @pinkladyprod and @pod.kink
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This episode features my conversation with guest host, fellow Black woman podcaster Jasmine Gary, about the book, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents (2020), by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Isabel Wilkerson and its film adaptation, Origin, written and directed by Ava DuVernay (Array). Both the book and the film revisit some very dark moments in history, making important connections to today’s political climate. Both are vital to experience now as DuVernay has been cited as saying she specifically wanted to make and release this film ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Though emotionally heavy, the book and film contribute key social commentary to the culture.
Visit Seat16.com to learn more about the film, Origin.
Jasmine Gary (she/her) is the founder and lead producer of Pink Lady Productions, a production company specializing in podcasts, founded in 2019.
Her love for creativity and expression began as a child when she sang, danced, acted, and stage-managed various productions in her middle and high school performing arts schools. A proud Patersionian, Jasmine went on to earn a B.A. in Communications from Howard University, graduating in 2015, which allowed her to explore the behind-the-scenes aspects of radio, TV, and film.
Jasmine became an avid listener of podcasts in 2017. So in 2019, she began editing and producing them. While developing Pink Lady Productions, she realized a gap in the representation of queer entrepreneurs and women of color in the podcasting world. Both in front of the microphone and behind-the-scenes, queer entrepreneurs and women of color and their stories continue to be underrepresented. So the mission of Pink Lady Productions is a simple one: to take on the role of "producer" so that artists can focus on creating and telling their stories.
Podcasting Is the New Kink! is a space for Black women to get inspiration and insight! Join host, Jasmine Gary, best known as Pink Lady, as she interviews wellness and healing professionals and reviews television adaptations of novels written by Black women. Learn to be your best and favorite self, and think more critically about media and society.
Find Jasmine on Instagram: @pinkladyprod and @pod.kink
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This episode features our conversation with Yael Valencia Aldana, the recipient of the 2024 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. We chatted about her forthcoming poetry collection, BLACK MESTIZA, which is scheduled for release in January of 2025 .
Yael Valencia Aldana is an award-winning poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection Black Mestiza (University of Kentucky Press, 2025) and the chapbook, Alien(s) (Bottlecap Press, 2023). She is a Pushcart Prize winner, and her work has been widely published, among others. She teaches creative writing at Florida International University and is the managing editor of Purple Ink Press. She lives in Florida near the ocean with her son and too many pets.
In Black Mestiza, Yael reckons with her identity as a Caribbean Afro-Latinx woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots and pays homage to the legacy, resilience, and fortitude of her ancestors. These stunning poems paint a vivid picture of everyday life and Aldana's experiences as a mixed-race woman, daughter, and mother.
The Pushcart Prize–winning poem "Black Person Head Bob" addresses how Black people silently yet soulfully acknowledge and see each other. "Why Don't You Write About Joy?" acknowledges the suffering that women of color endure while their cries and spirit remain resolute: because you cannot hear me / doesn't mean I am not singing. "Small Dark and Moving" skillfully represents the poet's journey and the souls she carries with her, evoking images of evolving landscapes and beings as they transition through different forms. The poet beautifully interweaves narratives regarding the constant presence and influence of her Caribbean parents and a desire for more connection with her Colombian grandmother and ancestry, capturing the essence of origins, blood ties, and the idea that nothing is ever truly lost. This collection is not only a testament to Aldana's deep-rooted connection to her heritage, but a compelling celebration and expression of pride, recognition, and a profound sense of community.
To learn more about Yael and her work, please visit YaelAldana.com.
Pre-order your copy of Black Mestiza TODAY!
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Welcome to Season Five of Black Writers Read!
For this season, we're expanding the definition of “writer” to look at narrative construction. We start the season with a Pushcart Prize winning author and we’ll end Season Five with a documentary filmmaker. We're beyond excited to add the genre Afrofuturism to the platform as well as two countries. I’ll also be bringing back some past guests to talk about their newest work.
Please be sure to subscribe as we'll be posting exclusive content to the audio podcast.
Thanks again for your support and ensuring that Black authors continue to matter.
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This bonus episode features my recent conversation with Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin from the latest release from A24 Films, SING SING.
About SING SING
Divine G (played by Colman Domingo), imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men, including wary newcomer (Clarence Maclin), in this stirring true story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art, starring an unforgettable ensemble cast of formerly incarcerated actors. In SING SING, Mr. Maclin plays a younger version of himself and his time participating in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts' theatre program. The film gifts us with a very intimate, inside look into the process of theatre-making and the transformative power of RTA.
Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment. Founded at Sing Sing in 1996, RTA works with professional teaching artists to lead year-round workshops in theater, dance, music, creative writing, and visual arts. The RTA model provides an intensive, comprehensive arts program in prison that builds critical life skills so that people can meet the challenges of connecting with family and community when released.
RTA demonstrates that an approach based on human dignity is vastly more successful than one based on punishment. Less than 3% of RTA members return to prison, compared to the national recidivism rate of 60%.
To learn more about Rehabilitation Through the Arts, please visit their website at rta-arts.org.
To find your local screening of SING SING, please visit https://tickets.singsing.movie/.
For folx based in Western MA/Northern CT, I highly encourage you to see the film at Amherst Cinema where Nicole is a proud member. The film opens at Amherst Cinema on Friday, August 23.
Special thanks to Mr. Maclin for making time to chat with Black Writers Read and the Allied Global Marketing and A24 for all of your hard work to make this interview happen!
Find A24's film, SING SING on Instagram: @singsingmovie
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Find Rehabilitation Through the Arts online: https://rta-arts.org/
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Today, August 2, 2024, is African American essayist, novelist, poet, cultural critic, orator and activist James Baldwin’s (1924-1987) centennial birthday. In this retrospective, we take a look back at conversations with poets whose work performs the task of "bearing witness", like that of Baldwin's writing.
Baldwin's canon of work explored fundamental questions about the experiences of African Americans, particularly issues pertaining to class, race, religion, masculinities, sexuality and social acceptance. Documenting the world and society as it was manifesting around him, Baldwin delivered the news to his readers as a way to advocate for change. Nicole highly recommends folx to read Baldwin's essay, Letter for My Nephew, which first appeared in The Progressive magazine in 1962.
Included on this bonus episode are:
Jason Montgomery's, or "JRM"(Writers Across the Margins, S4 E4) work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction, and political agency. They served as one of the 2021-2023 Poets Laureate for Easthampton, Massachusetts, serving with their partner, Alexandra Woolner.
Nandi Comer (S4 E14) is the Poet Laureate of Michigan. She is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly, 2020), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award.
Lynne Thompson (S4 E15) served as the 4th Poet Laureate of the City of Los Angeles. Her most recent poetry collection, Blue on a Blue Palette(BOA Editions, 2024), reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods.
M. Nzadi Keita (S4 E16) Migration Letters (Beacon Press, 2024), reflects on Black working-class identity and culture in Philadelphia, taking a closer look at what it means to be Black in America just after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
Aaron Dworkin (S4 E2), a 2005 MacArthur Fellow and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, originated the terminology “poetjournalism”, which he defines as “journalism in which a news story or other event is presented in poetic form incorporating elements of emotion, opinion and creative illustration.”
In Protection from Erasure (Jaded Ibis Press, 2023), Samuel "Sami" Miranda (S4 E1) aims to capture and celebrate a life lived and lives encountered. Through observations and conversations, we're reminded that mundane events and minute moments in our everyday lives can and should be
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In this bonus episode, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the book, Queenie (2019) by Candice Carty-Williams and its streaming television series adaptation.
The novel Queenie, published in 2019. is about the life and loves of its lead character, Queenie Jenkins. A 25-year-old British-Jamaican woman living in the UK, we follow her journey through a year from hell. Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
The television adaptation of the book was released in early June 2024 and is available to stream on Hulu, Disney+ and Star+.
For those of you who are new to this platform and my work, I’ve always been extremely interested in spectatorship and what draws us to the things we watch, read, and consume. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting bonus episodes where I talk about some of the books written by Black women that I’ve read recently that have been adapted for film and television. I really appreciate these types of formats as it makes work accessible to various audiences as some folx prefer to read while others prefer to watch a narrative interpretation of the thing.
Check out the trailer for the series, Queenie.
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I've been so excited to share insight on a project I've been working on for the past few months. Serving as editor on this project, I wanted to give the Black Writers Read community a preview of the anthology, Heavy is the Crown, which is scheduled for release in August of 2024. It is now available for pre-order.
Produced under the auspices of A Queen’s Narrative, Heavy is the Crown features essays and creative writing contributed by twenty-two women, femme-identified, and trans folx from across the country. Topics explored in this book include experiences with addiction, recovery, sexual assault, toxic workplaces, journeys as mothers and caregivers, pregnancy, immigration, identity, identities, domestic violence, generational trauma, incarceration, suicide, suicide ideation, and mental health. Authors explored their healing journeys and life lessons learned while offering advice for others who are going through something that might be similar.
In this episode, you'll hear from eight women who contributed their stories to the anthology in a mix of brief interviews and readings of excerpts from poems and creative nonfiction included in the anthology: T’challa Williams, Laverne Ben-Mansel, Yaya Gloria Agosto, Nzima Hutchings, Regine Jackson, Queenpen, Gri Saex and Barbara McClane.
Based in Western Massachusetts, A Queen's Narrative is a BIPOC women-led empowerment company whose mission is to define narrative power and use narrative storytelling to empower women and girls to become their best version. Using various platforms like blogs, newsletters, anthologies, events, and youth development programming help them in achieving the vision of amplifying the voices of women and girls for the rest of the world to hear. A Queen's Narrative is especially committed to providing free thematic youth development workshops that strengthen youth skills in public speaking, teamwork, leadership, and creative expression.
Special thanks to Samantha Hamilton, co-founder of A Queen’s Narrative and a contributor to the anthology, every person involved in A Queen’s Narrative and to each of the twenty-two women who have contributed their stories to Heavy is the Crown.
To learn more about A Queen’s Narrative, please visit aqueensnarrative.com.
For those of you who are local to Western Massachusetts, please join us in person on Sunday, August 18 at 11 a.m. for Brunch over Books, the official launch celebration of Heavy is the Crown. Tickets are available by visiting aqueensnarrative.com. By joining us for the event, you’ll be able to meet some of the authors and hear more about the process of creating this anthology. Print versions of the book will be available after this book launch event.
Pre-order your copy of Heavy is the Crown TODAY by visiting: https://aqueensnarrative.com/heavy-is-the-crown.
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This bonus episode features excerpts from five interviews from Season Four - those that we had with authors who write memoir. Over the summer, we will be revisiting conversations that cover the nuisances of genre, form, and style - offering mini masterclasses filled with advice and insight from some of our guests. This retrospective offers insight on source material, exploring the effects of traumatic experiences, self-reflecting on formative moments in life, and honoring the past. Memoir, which is considered creative nonfiction, offers writers a space to tackle difficult situations with grace and humility - also a chance to implore the mechanics of fiction to expand upon memory and circumstances.
Included on this bonus episode are:
Nada Samih-Rotondo (Writers Across the Margins, S4 E7) is a multi-genre Palestinian American writer, educator, and mother. Her writing has appeared in Masters Review, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and Squat Birth Journal. Our conversation featured her debut memoir, ALL WATER HAS PERFECT MEMORY, which blends folklore and history taking readers through the author's ancestral origins-and explores generations of silence and eventually, connection.
Minda Honey's (S4 E6) essays on politics and relationships have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.
K E Garland (S4 E8) uses personal essays and memoir to de-marginalize women's experiences with an intent to highlight and humanize contemporary issues. She has published essays with Midnight & Indigo, Raising Mothers, and For Harriet. We chatted about her debut memoir,IN SEARCH OF A SALVE: MEMOIR OF A SEX ADDICT.
Wakisha "Kisha" Stewart 's (S4 E18) SONATA FOR A DAMAGED HEART recounts the complicated professional and emotional journey that Kisha takes from heart failure to being selected in 2022 by the American Heart Association as one of twelve spokeswomen advocating for women’s heart health in its national education campaign, Reclaim Your Rhythm.
Lisa Braxton (S4 E19) is the author of the award-winning DANCING BETWEEN THE RAINDROPS: A DAUGHTER'S REFLECTION ON LOVE AND LOSS. This memoir in essays is a powerful meditation on grief, a deeply personal mosaic of a daughter’s remembrances of beautiful, challenging and heartbreaking moments of life with her family. It speaks to anyone who has lost a loved one and is trying to navigate the world without them while coming to terms with complicated emotions.
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In celebration of Juneteenth, we revisit our conversations with fiction authors featured during Season Four to reflect on approaches to creating worlds for our characters and what informs this work.
Included in this bonus episode are:
David Jackson Ambrose (S4 E17) writes on the intersections of race, sexuality and generational trauma. During our conversation, which took place during National Mental Health Awareness Month, we had a chance to talk about David’s three books, State of the Nation, A Blind Eye, and Unlawful DISorder.
Kerika Fields (S4 E5) is a Brooklyn, New York-based writer and photographer whose work has been published and exhibited widely. We talked about her novella, With Your Bad Self, a coming-of-age love story set in an economically challenged Brooklyn on the precipice of WWII where 'Love Conquers All' may not be true this time.
Donna Hemans (S4 E10) is the author of three novels, River Woman, Tea by the Sea, and The House of Plain Truth. She lives in Maryland, and is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, D.C. Central to our conversation was Donna’s recently released novel, The House of Plain Truth , a lyrical, lush, evocative story about a fractured Jamaican family and a daughter determined to reclaim her home.
Chana Shinegba's (S4 E13) her debut novel, Dancer in the Bullpenblends elements of autobiographical fiction with magical realism. The novel speaks to those who, like Chana, have grappled with their sense of uniqueness and emerged empowered to embrace their true selves. Dancer in the Bullpenis scheduled for release on June 21, 2024.
Aina Hunter (S4 E3) is an artist based in Western Massachusetts with a background in journalism, Food Studies and Japanese. We talked about her debut novel (science fiction), Charlotte and the Chickenman: the Inevitable Nigrescence of Charlotte-Noa Tibbit.
T.H. Moore (S4 E9) is a Southwest Philadelphia native who relocated to Camden, New Jersey at the age of ten. Blending his experience living and working abroad combined with imagination helped formulate the basis of, and inspired him to write his first novel, The End Justifies the Means. His forthcoming memoir, Ghetto Bastard, scheduled for release in July of 2024.
Angie Chatman (S4 E12) is a writer, storyteller and 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee having written short stories and essays for a variety of publications and platforms including Insider Personal Finance, Brevity, TaintTaintTaint Magazine, and The Rumpus. Born and raised on Chicago's South Side, Angie now lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston with her family.
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***The episode numbers cited here are from the order of the audio podcasts. To watch each episode, please vis
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This episode features our conversation with Lisa Braxton about her recently released memoir, Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter’s Reflections on Love and Loss, which was live-streamed on June 1, 2024.
Lisa Braxton is the author of the award-winning Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter’s Reflections on Love and Loss (Sea Crow Press, April 2024). The memoir in essays is a powerful meditation on grief, a deeply personal mosaic of a daughter’s remembrances of beautiful, challenging and heartbreaking moments of life with her family. It speaks to anyone who has lost a loved one and is trying to navigate the world without them while coming to terms with complicated emotions. She is also the author of the novel, The Talking Drum, winner of a 2021 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards Gold Medal, overall winner of Shelf Unbound book review magazine’s 2020 Independently Published Book Award, winner of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, and a Finalist for the International Book Awards. She is an Emmy nominated former TV journalist and is a writing instructor at Grub Street Boston. She is the presidents of the Greater Boston Section of the National Council of Negro Women and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Lisa Braxton's parents died within two years of each other-her mother from ovarian cancer, her father from prostate cancer. While caring for her mother she was stunned to find out that she, herself, had a life-threatening illness—breast cancer. In the intimate, lyrical memoir-in-essays of Dancing Between the Raindrops, Lisa Braxton takes us to the core of her loss and extends a lifeline of comfort to anyone who needs to be reminded that in their grief they are not alone.
To learn more about Lisa and her work, please visitlisabraxton.com.
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This episode features our conversation with Wakisha Stewart, which was live-streamed on May 18, 2024 in recognition of Women’s Health Week (May 12th-18th) and National Share a Story Month.
Wakisha (Kisha) Stewart is a wife, mother of three, nurse, heart attack survivor, and a national advocate for heart health dedicated to improving the quality of cardiovascular health care for everyone. Since her heart attack in 2011 at age 31, she has conducted extensive research about the specific health risks that women, particularly Black women, face.
A dynamic, nationally recognized speaker on ways to improve heart health through lifestyle changes and a fierce advocate for systemic changes in the health care system to guarantee equity and social justice for all, Kisha, a nurse with a unique perspective and survivor on a mission, was a national spokeswoman chosen in 2022 by the American Heart Association (AHA) to educate the public about the risks of cardiovascular disease.
In collaboration with the American Heart Association, Kisha wrote the memoir, SONATA FOR A DAMAGED HEART.
SONATA FOR A DAMAGED HEART is one Black woman’s story of a near-death experience following her second pregnancy and the racial disparities in the healthcare industry that contributed to it. The memoir is both a moving, lyrically told story of a decade-long struggle to survive a near-fatal heart attack with dignity and a clarion call for community-wide mobilization to guarantee health care equity.
SONATA FOR A DAMAGED HEART recounts the complicated professional and emotional journey that Kisha takes from heart failure to being selected in 2022 by the American Heart Association as one of twelve spokeswomen advocating for women’s heart health in its national education campaign, Reclaim Your Rhythm.
To learn more about Kisha and her book, please visit kishaandscad.com.
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This episode features our conversation with David Jackson Ambrose, which was live-streamed on May 11, 2024 in recognition of National Mental Health Awareness Month.
David Jackson Ambrose writes on the intersections of race, sexuality and generational trauma. Through fiction, his work explores various genres, topics, and themes including African American life, Black history, LGBTQ issues and life, prison industrial complex, mental health, and generational trauma. David has an MFA in Creative Writing from Temple University, an MA in Writing Studies from Saint Joseph’s University, and a BA in Africana Studies from The University of Pennsylvania. He has over twenty years of experience working in social services. During our conversation, we had a chance to talk about David’s three books, State of the Nation, A Blind Eye, and Unlawful DISorder.
State of the Nation (The TMG Firm, 2018) is a Lambda Award finalist. State of the Nation looks at the impact of the Atlanta Child Murders and Tuskegee experiment on three friends living in Philadelphia. Each struggles to survive and create an identity in a world that ignores them at best, and preys upon them at worst, much like the children in Atlanta.
A Blind Eye (NineStar Press, 2021) is a winner of the Rainbow Book Award, looks at homelessness, male to male (m2m) domestic violence, and the ways American school systems treat Black children with special needs compared to their white counterparts.
David's most recent work, Unlawful DISorder (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022), looks at racial disparities in diagnoses & treatment for Black men with mental health disorders when treatment is imposed by the judicial system instead of the behavioral health system.
To learn more about David and his work, please visit https://davidjacksonambrose.com.
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This episode features our conversation withLynne Thompson, which was live-streamed on April 14, 2024 closing out National Poetry Month.
Lynne Thompson served as the 4th Poet Laureate of the City of Los Angeles. She's the author of four collections of poetry: Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013), Fretwork (Marsh Hawk Press, 2019) and, most recently, Blue On A Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024). In 2022, Thompson was awarded a Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets and in 2023, she received the George Drury Smith Award for Achievement in Poetry from Beyond Baroque. Thompson has also received fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, the Summer Literary Series in Kenya, and Vermont Studio Center. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Gulf Coast. Thompson sits on the Boards of the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, Los Angeles Review of Books, and her alma mater, Scripps College.
Lynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette (which is featured on this episode) reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”
This episode is presented in collaboration with Perugia Press. Founded in 1997, Perugia Press is a nonprofit feminist press that publishes one beautifully designed book each year: the winner of the Perugia Press Prize, their annual national contest for first or second books of poetry by women-identified authors. To learn more about Perugia Press and the Perugia Press Prize, please visit perugiapress.org.
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This episode features our conversation with M. Nzadi Keita, which was live-streamed on April 14, 2024 during National Poetry Month.
M. Nzadi Keita's new poetry collection, Migration Letters (Beacon Press, April 2, 2024), reflects on Black working-class identity and culture in Philadelphia. Her second book, Brief Evidence of Heaven (Whirlwind Press, 2014), shed light on Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick Douglass’ first wife and was cited in David Blight ‘s prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Her writing appears in anthologies and journals such as A Face to Meet the Faces: A Persona Poetry Anthology, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and About Place. Keita won a Pew Fellow in Poetry, a Leeway Foundation Transformation Award, and served as an adviser to the documentary, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez. For many years, she taught creative writing, American literature, and Africana Studies at Ursinus College.
Her latest book, Migration Letters, is a poetry collection that takes a closer look at what it means to be Black in America just after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. This new addition to Beacon Press’s “Raised Voices Poetry Series” centers on Black working-class Philadelphia from the 1960s to the present day. Migration Letters shares a story about Black people that resonates across generations—Black people innovating, learning by doing, teaching by witnessing, and evolving in spite of themselves.
To learn more about Nzadi and her work, please visit www.zeekeita.com.
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Happy National Poetry Month! Launched in April of 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month celebrates the literary traditions sustained by this mode of storytelling. Thank you so very much to every single poet who has joined me on this platform.
This episode features our conversation with Nandi Comer (poetry.), which was live-streamed on April 7, 2024.
Nandi Comer is the Poet Laureate of Michigan. She is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly, 2020), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. She is the co-director of Detroit Lit, a project that provides reading and professional development opportunities for narrative makers of color in Detroit.
To learn more about Nandi and her work, please visit nandicomer.com.
Find Nandi on Instagram: @nandicomer
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This episode features our conversation with Chana Shinegba, which was live-streamed on March 30, 2024.
Chana Shinegba, a gifted storyteller, embodies the spirit of resilience and creativity that defines her generation. Coming of age as a young Black girl in the vibrant but complex landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, Chana grappled with acknowledging her innate talents amidst the backdrop of societal expectations and personal fears.
From a tender age, Chana’s artistic prowess manifested in various forms. While her first haiku, penned at age five, hinted at her literary inclinations, her enchanting dance moves initially stole the spotlight. Yet, beneath the graceful exterior, her passion for storytelling simmered, finding expression within the pages of her childhood diary, where poems and short stories danced with vivid imagination.
Chana’s literary journey took flight through her academic years, where her adept writing skills shone brightly. Her knack for words also made her the go- to person for leading literary endeavors among family and friends. However, it wasn't until a transformative experience at a summer journalism program at American University that Chana realized she didn’t want to be confined to traditional news reporting.
Embarking on a career in the hospitality industry, Chana immersed herself in the world of good food and even better company. Yet, her creative spirit remained undeterred, forging a bond with the pen that eventually blossomed into her debut novel, Dancer in the Bullpen, which blends elements of autobiographical fiction with magical realism. The novel speaks to those who, like Chana, have grappled with their sense of uniqueness and emerged empowered to embrace their true selves. Dancer in the Bullpenis scheduled for release this summer in June, published by Jaded Ibis Press.
This episode of Black Writers Read is presented in collaboration with Levee Break Lit.
To pre-order copies of Dancer in the Bullpen, please visit Barnes and Noble online.
Find Chana on Instagram: @chanalucky7
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This episode features our conversation with Angie Chatman, which was live-streamed on March 16, 2024. For long-time Black Writers Read supporters you may remember Angie from our Black History Month Virtual Event in 2021.
Angie Chatman is a writer and storyteller. She's written for Insider Personal Finance, MIT Tech Review, the National Science Foundation, Yahoo News and elsewhere. Her literary work has appeared in Brevity, TaintTaintTaint Magazine, Literary Landscapes, Pangyrus, The Rumpus, Blood Orange Review, Hippocampus Magazine. She was a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. Chatman has appeared on The Moth Radio Hour, GBH/World Channel’s Stories from the Stage, and Story Collider. An engineer by degree, Chatman also earned an MBA from MIT-Sloan and an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte. Born and raised on Chicago's southside, Angie now lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston with her family.
To learn more about Angie and her expansive body of work, please visit angiecwriter.com.
During the episode, I mention a commentary piece that I wrote for New England Public Media a while back. Please check out my very first Commentary piece!
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This episode features our conversation with Janine Fondon, which was recorded during our live event held in person on March 4, 2024 at Holyoke Media.
Janine Fondon, MFA, is an award-winning writer, digital media producer, and educator/historian who uses the art and science of communication and inclusion to elevate voices, engage audiences, and inspire creative thinking in a world of change. As Assistant Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Communications at Bay Path University for ten years, she founded the college's inaugural multimedia digital newsroom for students and continues to work on communication projects to connect communities.
Fondon earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Anthropology from Colgate University, a Master of Arts in Communications and Business from New York University, and her MFA (Creative Nonfiction Writing) from Bay Path University.
As a media ecologist, artist-curator, and narrative historian, Fondon created a popular museum exhibit on women's history, "Voices of Resilience," highlighting inclusive narratives bearing untold stories.
Amongst her many awards, she has received the Pynchon Medal, the Western Massachusetts region's 100+-year-old public-service award from the Advertising Club of Western Massachusetts as well as several creative awards. She also has a 20-year legacy of content creation, diverse outreach, and public relations. Fondon and her husband created a legacy communication project, UnityFirst.com, which is now one of the longest-running, Black-owned e-news sites founded in Massachusetts that serves an inclusive audience nationwide. She has also published numerous editorials in the local newspaper, 'The Springfield Republican,' and created a range of narrative history video stories on UnityFirst.com.
Fondon is inspired and honored to tell the stories of many generations.
To learn more about Janine and her work, please visit janinefondon.com.
During the interview, we mention Natalia Muñoz's oral history project, Our Grandmothers. To learn more or to inquire about participating, please visit ourgrandmothers.org.
Special thanks to the On the Move Forum and Holyoke Media for supporting this event.
This episode of Black Writers Read is dedicated in memory of interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Demetria “Dee” Shabazz who assumed her role as ancestor last fall. Both Janine and Nicole had the honor of working with her, Nicole as a former student and mentee and Janine as a colleague and fellow professor. Please take a moment to read about Dr. Shabazz's beautiful life: Obituary.
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This episode features our conversation with Donna Hemans, which was live streamed on Saturday, February 17, 2024. We chatted about her recently released novel, The House of Plain Truth, and her writing career.
Donna Hemans is the author of three novels, River Woman, Tea by the Sea, and The House of Plain Truth. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Slice, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, Crab Orchard Review, among others. She received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Maryland, and is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, D.C.
Central to our conversation was Donna’s recently released novel, The House of Plain Truth (Zibby Books, 2024). The House of Plain Truth is a lyrical, lush, evocative story about a fractured Jamaican family and a daughter determined to reclaim her home.
When Pearline receives grave news about her ailing father, she abruptly leaves Brooklyn for her childhood home in Jamaica. But Pearline isn’t prepared for a tense reunion with her sisters or for her father’s startling deathbed wish that she repair their long-broken family legacy and find the sister and two brothers no one has seen in more than 50 years.
Moving through time and place, from modern-day Brooklyn and Montego Bay to 1930s Havana and back again, The House of Plain Truth is a journey through generational secrets and a family coming to terms with its past.
Inspired by the author's own history, this soulful novel explores a fascinating story of immigration, divided loyalties, and what one woman must sacrifice in her attempt to find home.
To learn more about Donna and her expansive body of work, please visit donnahemans.com.
Find Donna on Instagram: @donna_hemans
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This episode features our conversation with T.H. Moore, which was live streamed on Saturday, February 10, 2024. We chatted about his forthcoming memoir, Ghetto Bastard, and his expansive body of work.
T.H. Moore is a Southwest Philadelphia native who relocated to Camden, New Jersey at the age of ten. He’s an active member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Morgan State University. His career as an Information Technology Consultant and Real-Estate investor has afforded him the opportunity to travel to many countries all over the world as well as most of the United States. Blending experience with imagination helped formulate the basis of, and inspired him to write his first novel, The End Justifies the Means.
His second novel, The Devil’s Whisper, is uniquely creative fiction that ventures away from the inspiration of his own life experiences. In The Devil’s Whisper, he dives into a darker set of dual protagonists whose sole objective is to survive the circumstances of the world they live in. In his third novel, I AM..., T.H. Moore plays clairvoyant and without apology release the wrath of American citizens targeted by police brutality.
In his latest work titled, Ghetto Bastard: A Memoir (scheduled for release in July 2024), he takes an honest audit and chronicling of his life traumas and the decisions resulting from them and how they shaped his life both good and bad. He shares how acknowledging his flawed behavior ultimately led to resolving them with the help of therapy. Now, emotionally free and at peace he shares his journey for the first time with readers.
To learn more about T.H. and to purchase his books, please visit his website at thmoorenovels.com.
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This episode features our conversation with K E Garland, which was live streamed on Saturday, January 6, 2024. We chatted about her debut memoir, In Search of a Salve.
K E Garland is a creative nonfiction writer and blogger based in Florida. She uses personal essays and memoir to de-marginalize women's experiences with an intent to highlight and humanize contemporary issues. She has published essays with Midnight & Indigo, Raising Mothers, and For Harriet. Other works have appeared in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, I'm Speaking Now: Black Women Share Their Truth in 101 Stories of Love, Courage and Hope, All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World-Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom, and other anthologies.
Garland’s writing has been awarded twice with the Florida Writers Association for her unpublished creative nonfiction essay, “The Transition” and for her blogging series, “Mental Health Matters.” She is married with two adult daughters and is an associate professor at a community college.
To learn more about K E and her work, please visit kegarland.com.Special thanks to Danielle Jernigan who was featured on Season Three Episode Fourteen of Black Writers Read for introducing us to K E.
Find K E on Instagram: @kegarland
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This episode features our conversation with Nada Samih-Rotondo (nonfiction. fiction.), which was live-streamed on Saturday, December 16, 2023.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Levee Break Lit.
Nada Samih-Rotondo is a multi-genre Palestinian American writer, educator, and mother. A graduate of Rhode Island College, she earned degrees in English and Education and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. When she is not befriending trees or attuning to hidden stories, she is leading transformational educational experiences and addressing the social-emotional needs of historically underserved and multilingual youth. Her writing has appeared in Masters Review, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and Squat Birth Journal. She lives in Providence with her husband and three children. All Water Has Perfect Memory (Jaded Ibis Press, 2023) is her first book.
All Water Has a Perfect Memory is a memoir that takes readers from the author’s ancestral origins - the coast of Yaffa, Palestine, to her birthplace of Kuwait, eventually landing on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. Life changed forever for six-year-old Nada following Iraq’s invasion of her birth country, Kuwait, and subsequent immigration to the United States with her maternal family. Just as she finally settles into her strange new life apart from her father in Rhode Island, learns English, and grasps the fact that she is not merely visiting but is here to stay, life throws other surprises her way to forever change her world. narrative confronts generations of silence and, ultimately, revelation with an imaginative blend of folklore and history that explores the relationship between our bodies, ancestors, and the Earth. The work explores the way the author is intertwined with her maternal line while reuniting with her father after a 30-year separation.
Voices once hidden in the waters of our bodies are amplified and released to forever alter the landscape, breaking cycles and seeding an audacious hope interconnected to lands past and present.
To learn more about Nada and her other work, please visit her website at https://nowapproachingprovidence.wordpress.com.
Find Nada on Instagram: @nadasamihwrites
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This episode features our conversation with Minda Honey, which was live streamed on Saturday, November 18, 2023, about her memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS.
Minda Honey’s essays on politics and relationships have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads.
Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger”, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South”, and “Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic.”
She is the editor of Black Joy at Reckon — the newsletter has nearly 60K subscribers. She was the director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University, a relationship advice columnist for LEO Weekly in Louisville, Kentucky, and founder of the capsule project, TAUNT, an alt-indie publication for Louisville that elevated the voices of the unaccounted during the height of the pandemic and ended in late 2021.
Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A, October 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.
To learn more about Minda and her work, please visit mindahoney.com.
Find Minda on Instagram: @mindahoney
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This episode features our latest conversation with Kerika Fields, which was live- streamed on Saturday, October 28, 2023. We chatted about her latest book, With Your Bad Self.
Kerika Fields is a Brooklyn, New York-based writer and photographer whose work has been published and exhibited widely. She is the author of With Your Bad Self (Jacaranda Books, November 29, 2022). With Your Bad Self is a coming-of-age love story set in an economically challenged Brooklyn on the precipice of WWII where 'Love Conquers All' may not be true this time. Her debut book, He’s Gone…You’re Back! The Right Way to Get Over Mr. Wrong, was published by Kensington Publishing and released in 2010.
She has covered current events and the arts & entertainment scene in NYC for over two decades. Her articles and photographs have appeared in The Amsterdam News, Black Elegance, Caribbean Life, The Daily News, Honey, Savoy, The Source, Spice!, Variety, Vibe and online at ABFF.com, Bust.com, curlynikki.com, soulhead.com, and Tuenight.com.
Kerika Fields' photographs have been exhibited at The African American Museum of Philadelphia, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn Moon Café, Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn, Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, 40 Acres Art Gallery in San Francisco, The McKenna Museum in New Orleans, and the RUSH Arts Gallery and Leica Gallery in Manhattan.
She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and the spirit of her cat Smokey. Learn more about Kerika and her other work by visiting withyourbadself.com.
Find Kerika on Instagram: @with_yourbadself
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Welcome to our special series, Black Writers Read Presents Writers Across the Margins, our opportunity to chat with writers from other Diasporas!
This episode features our conversation with Jason Montgomery which was live streamed on Saturday, October 7, 2023. During our chat, Jason shared an excerpt from his latest poetry collection, These Latest Apocalypses which was recently published by Arteidolia Press.
Jason R. Montgomery (he/they), or JRM, is a Chicano/Indigenous Californian writer, painter, community artist and engagement artist from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Jason’s work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction, and political agency. His writing and visual art bridges the aesthetics and feel from the early cubist collage movement and the Russian abstract movement of the 1920s with living and historical Native/Indigenous Californian and Chicano art traditions to explore the Post-colonial narrative through active synthesis and guided (re)construction. JRM’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, Ilanot Review, Rust and Moth and other publications. Jason is one of 2021 Newell Flather Awards for Leadership in Public Art outstanding nominees and 2021-2023 Easthampton Poets Laureate. Jason is also the co-founder of the police abolition group “A Knee is Not Enough” (AKINE) in Easthampton, MA.
To learn more about Jason and their other work, please visit attackbearpress.com.
Find Jason on Instagram: @howka.jrm or @attackbearpress
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This episode features our latest conversation with Aina Hunter (science fiction.), which was live-streamed on Sunday, September 24, 2023. We chatted about her debut novel, Charlotte and the Chickenman: the Inevitable Nigrescence of Charlotte-Noa Tibbit (Whiskey Tit Books, 2022)
Based in Western Massachusetts, Aina Hunter is an artist with a background in journalism, Food Studies and Japanese having studied at Columbia University, New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and University of California Berkeley. She has written award-winning features for The Village Voice, Essence, Mother Jones and others.
About the Book
It's November 2, 2059 in Baltimore and Charlotte-Noa Tibitt, the downwardly mobile, adult daughter of a popular HelloCast lifestyle coach, feels like death. A few months back Charlotte and her Eurindigenous girlfriend scored a sweet subsidized apartment in a building chock full of fellow queer-radical-feminist animal rights activists. But when an unspeakable right-wing candidate again wins the US presidency, Charlotte seeks refuge in a luxury roof-top hotel bar and life begins to unravel.
So now it’s time to stop mourning. Get back on the bus, make a plan, start over.
All this on a screaming planet divided into ethno-states mostly controlled by South Africa’s ruling Economic Freedom Party and their right wing, anti-black opposition – the Eurin supremacists of the New Broederband.
Charlotte could probably use some trauma therapy, but first a quick trip to Haiti for a medical thing. And while she’s there, maybe she can find some comfort at the receiving end of a controversial reparative food justice initiative, which may or may not be sanctioned by New Caricom’s shadow government.
Find Aina on Instagram: @eat_ur_yte
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This episode features our latest conversation with Aaron Dworkin, which was live-streamed on Sunday, September 17, 2023. We chatted about his latest poetry collection, The Poetjournalist, and his evolving work as a writer.
Named a 2005 MacArthur Fellow, President Obama’s first appointment to the National Council on the Arts and member of President Biden’s Arts Policy Committee, Aaron P. Dworkin is former dean and current Professor of Arts Leadership & Entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Aaron is a best-selling writer and poetjournalist having authored his poetry collection, They Said I Wasn’t Really Black, along with four other books including his memoir, Uncommon Rhythm: A Black, White, Jewish, Jehovah's Witness, Irish Catholic Adoptee's Journey to Leadership and The Entrepreneurial Artist: Lessons from Highly Successful Creatives. Aaron originated the terminology “poetjournalism” which he defines as “journalism in which a news story or other event is presented in poetic form incorporating elements of emotion, opinion and creative illustration.” He serves as the Poet-in-Residence of the City of Ann Arbor’s Bicentennial, the Rodham Institute, Fisher Foundation, Wright Museum of African-American History, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Grantmakers in the Arts, Ovation TV and Shar Music. He has been featured on The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN, Jet Magazine and named one of Newsweek’s “15 People Who Make America Great.” His Emmy award-winning film An American Prophecy was honored by numerous festivals, while his digital art project, Fractured History, has exhibited to rave reviews.
Aaron is also a leading social entrepreneur having founded the globally-recognized Sphinx Organization, the leading arts organization with the mission of transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts. He also serves as host of the nationally-broadcast Arts Engines show with a viewership of over 100,000.
A sought-after global thought leader and a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion, excellence in arts education, entrepreneurship, and leadership, as well as inclusion in the performing arts, Aaron is a frequent keynote speaker and lecturer at numerous universities and global arts, creativity, and technology conferences and is on the roster of the prestigious APB speakers bureau. Having raised over $50 million for philanthropic causes, Aaron personifies creative leadership, entrepreneurship, and community service with an unwavering passion for the arts, diversity, and their role in society.
To access Aaron's full bio and learn more about his other work, please visit his website at www.aarondworkin.com.
Find Aaron on Instagram: @aaronpdworkin
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Welcome to our first episode of Season Four of Black Writers Read!
This episode featu4res our latest conversation with Sami Miranda, which was live-streamed on Saturday, September 9, 2023. We chatted about his latest poetry collection,Protection from Erasure, and his body of work.
Samuel "Sami" Miranda grew up in the South Bronx and resides in Washington, DC. He is a visual artist, poet, and teacher who uses his craft to highlight the value of everyday people and places. His work is heavily influenced by Puerto Rican culture and family history, as well as his interactions with his students, people he encounters in his travels, and DC locals. Much of his work is figurative and explores how the body and face illustrate the successes, hardships, and beliefs that people carry with them. He is the author of Protection from Erasure, published by Jaded Ibis Press, Departure, a chapbook published by Central Square Press, and We Is, published by Zozobra Publishing. He is currently working on collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists about the deep connections they can make through their artwork. Samuel's artwork has been exhibited internationally in Puerto Rico and Madrid, as well as New York and Washington, DC. Most recently, Samuel's artwork has been included in the Smithsonian's new Molina Family Latino Gallery inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! His artwork has been included in University and private collections.
In Protection from Erasure, Samuel Miranda aims to capture and celebrate a life lived and lives encountered. Through observations and conversations, we're reminded that mundane events and minute moments in our everyday lives can and should be memorialized. Part portraiture, part social commentary, and part memory, Protection from Erasure is meticulously crafted with arresting dialogue, sincere lines, and raw reflections that knit together and hover upon the edge of a shared remembrance.
To learn more about Sami and her work, please visit his website at samimiranda.com.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Levee Break Lit. Special thanks to Lisa Pegram and Levee Break Lit for supporting this episode.
Find Sami on Instagram: @tres_raices_arts
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We are super excited to kick off Season Four of Black Writers Read! Learn more about our upcoming lineup of guests and an upcoming project, Writers from the Margins.
We're also thrilled to share with you our new online home: www.blackwritersread.com. We launched our website earlier this summer. On it, you'll have access to past episodes and information on upcoming events including live-streamed interviews and book discussions with our authors. Be sure to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.
Thank you for your support and we look forward to sharing this journey with you.
Find Black Writers Read on IG: @blackwritersread
Find our host, Nicole on IG: @coco@penexplore
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This episode features excerpts from four conversations we’ve had with guests that reflect on topics relevant to the Juneteenth holiday including family, ancestral influences, food, culture, and honoring our pasts.
Included on this bonus episode are the following conversations:
Saida Agostini (S2 E6 of the livestream series/Retrospective Episode on the audio podcast) read excerpts from let the dead in. let the dead in is an exploration of the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation. Audacious, sensual, and grieving, this work explores how Black women harness the fantastic to craft their own road to freedom. A journey across Guyana, London, and the United States, it is a meditation on black womanhood, queerness, the legacy of colonization, and pleasure. These poems craft a creation story fat with love, queerness, mermaids, and blackness. Listen to Saida's full interview.
St. Clair Detrick-Jules (S3 E1) is an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, author, activist, and public speaker. She captures personal stories and intimate moments centering Black liberation, immigrant justice, and women's rights. An Afro-Caribbean artist who remains rooted in her community, St. Clair grounds her work in radical love, joy and the knowledge that a more just world is possible. Her book, My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood (Chronicle Books, September 2021), showcases the photographs and stories of Black women embracing their crowns. Listen to St. Clair's full interview.
Lisa Pegram (S3 E10) is a writer, arts integration specialist and publishing professional who hails from Washington, DC. She has over 20 years of experience in high-level program design for such organizations as the Smithsonian Institute, Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Geographic. She served as DC WritersCorps program director for a decade, and as co-chair of United Nations affiliate international women’s conferences in the US, India and Bali. She is currently working on a family memoir that is a narrative cookbook which explores her life story through the lens of food and music. Listen to Lisa's full interview.
Desiree Cooper's (S3 E6) Nothing Specialis a buddy story that spans generations. Published by Wayne State University Press and illustrated by Bec Stone, it's also a love letter to the black family connections that survived the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South, but they never forgot the culture, the land, and the family they left behind. Nothing Special celebrates the enduring connection between the generations who stayed in the South, and the millions of emigrants for whom it will always be home.
Listen to Desiree's full interview.
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This episode features our latest livestream from Saturday, June 10, 2023 with our guest, Kimberly Mack to discuss her latest book, Time’s Up, which is on the band, Living Colour’s sophomore album.
Kimberly Mack will begin her time as the Associate Professor of English at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign this coming fall. Her book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 book series, was published in May 2023. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award. Kimberly is writing another book, tentatively titled The Untold History of American Rock Criticism, about the BIPoC and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s.
Kimberly holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and she has received fellowships and scholarships to attend writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Kimberly is a memoirist and music writer, and her scholarly and public-facing articles and essays have appeared in African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, AMP: American Music Perspectives, Longreads, No Depression, and elsewhere.
The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid. Time's Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as varied as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger. The clash of sounds and styles don't immediately fit. The confrontational hardcore-thrash metal - complete with Glover's apocalyptic wail - in the title track is not a natural companion with Doug E. Fresh's human beat box on “Tag Team Partners,” but it's precisely this bold and brilliant collision that creates the barely-controlled chaos. And isn't rock & roll about chaos?
Living Colour's sophomore effort holds great relevance in light of its forward-thinking politics and lyrical engagement with racism, classism, police brutality, and other social and political issues of great importance. Through interviews with members of Living Colour, and others involved in the making of Time's Up, Kimberly Mack explores the creation and reception of this artistically challenging album, while examining the legacy of this culturally important and groundbreaking American rock band.
To learn more about Kim and her work, please visit her website at kimberlymack.com.
Find Kim on Instagram: @dr._kimberly_mack
Find Kim on Twitter: @drkimberlymack
This episode features our latest livestreamed from Sunday, June 4, 2023 with our guest, Itua Uduebo to discuss his debut novel, Parade of Streetlights.
Itua was born in Lagos, Nigeria and currently resides in New York, NY. He graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in International Politics and works in the financial technology industry. Itua's writing journey began in 2016 and to date, he has several essays, articles, freeform poems, and short stories published online and in print. His work explores multiple genres including new adult fiction, urban literature, science fiction, thrillers, politics, racial justice, culture, and global affairs. Itua is working on his second novel manuscript and always looking to take on new creative challenges.
Told in vignettes, Parade of Streetlights is a deeply personal and introspective novel that features characters who are working through many personal absurdities. Published by Read Furiously, this is a novel about the choices we make, the ways we restrict ourselves needlessly, and the freedom of embracing the authentic pursuit of happiness. Kola's voice is a welcome addition to the literary canon and his story will stay with you long after the last page is finished.
Parade of Streetlights celebrated its release on Tuesday, June 6. It is available for purchase wherever you get your books.
To learn more about Itua and his work, please visit his website at ituauduebo.com.
Find Itua on Instagram: @i.uduebo.
This episode features our latest livestreamed from Saturday, May 13, 2023 in honor of Mother’s Day weekend. We chatted with poet and nonfiction writer, Shirley A. Jones Luke who read for our 2021 Black History Month virtual event.
Shirley A. Jones Luke is a poet and writer. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. Luke has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems focus on culture, family, and society. Ms. Luke is working on her first collection entitled Traumaland, a manuscript in progress.
When preparing for Black Writers Read, we ask each guest on why do they write. Here’s what Shirley had to share:
"I write to survive. Writing keeps me alive. I write because I owe my deceased mother a book. I write for the future. My words and works will outlive me. Writing is immortality. I write to share and to inform. I write because there are those who wish to erase our stories from history. I write because our stories matter. At this time, there are those who worship guns over people. There are those who want to ban our books. I write to stop the erasure of my people's history in this country. Poetry is a powerful medium. I use poetry to express my feelings and thoughts. Poetry is a flexible form. I can do so much with my words through poetry."
Shirley’s work is available on her website at allpoetry.com/Sjluke. Also find her work on Medium.
To follow Shirley's writing journey on Instagram: @writercreativessjl
To follow Shirley's love of fashion on Instagram: @fashionistasjl
This episode features our conversation with Lisbeth White (poetry. prose.), which was livestreamed on Saturday, April 29, 2023. Lisbeth is the author of the 2022 Perugia Prize winning poetry collection, AMERICAN SYCAMORE.
From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, AMERICAN SYCAMORE examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine. In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement in a Black mixed-race feminine body, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions.
Lisbeth White is a writer and ritualist living on S’klallam and Chimacum lands of Port Townsend, Washington. As a cross-genre writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, her writing explores the sensual and sociopolitical intersections of healing, ancestry, mythopoetics, and connection to the natural world. She has received support from VONA, Artist’s Trust, Tin House, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli, Apogee Lit, Green Mountains Review, Willowherb Review, EcoTheo Review, Split this Rock, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection American Sycamore, winner of the 2022 Perugia Press Prize and co-editor of the anthology, Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, published by North Atlantic Books, which is scheduled to be released in May.
To learn more about Lisbeth, please visit her website at www.lisbethwrites.com.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Perugia Press. To learn more about Perugia Press, please visit: https://perugiapress.org/
Find Lisbeth on Instagram: @earthmaven
Find Perugia Press on Instagram: @perugiapress
Find Perugia Press on Twitter: @perugiapress
This episode features our conversation with certified doula, writer, book coach, and host of the Write to Heal Podcast, Danielle Jernigan, which was livestreamed on Saturday, April 15, 2023 during Black Maternal Health Week.
During our conversation, we talked about Daniellle's writing for popular audiences, how her past work experience in medical research pairs nicely with her current writing endeavors, and briefly about her current manuscript in development, Healing Mother Wounds.
Danielle's work in maternal health focuses on helping doulas leverage their expertise and creative aspirations so they can write a heart-centered book that elevates their presence and attracts aligned clients with ease. Danielle's writing has been featured in Madame Noire Magazine, Your Tango, and Nourishing Word Blog and she’d been quoted in the Washington Post, New York Times Parenting Newsletter, and POPSUGAR Wellness.
Prior to pursuing her literary career, she spent 20 years in medical research which garnered her co-authorship in 20 publications, including two textbooks. Her academic checklist includes a bachelor’s in biology from Delaware State University. Master in medical science from Indiana University School of Medicine and Graduate Studies in Publishing and Creative Writing at Drexel University.
She's a vegan in principle — more of a whole foods-based flexitarian who won’t eat certain meats. But loves ethnic food so much she'll dabble here and there. She describes herself as a super opinionated introvert and quite bookish who loves art museums and sculptures, Japanese gardens, and black-and-white movies. Long drives towards the ocean and homegrown watermelons with seeds. She's the mother of two children and resides in Indiana with her youngest daughter Zoë. Danielle is represented by Carly Watters of PSI Literary Agency.
To learn more about Danielle, please visit her website at www.daniellejerniganauthor.com.
Find Danielle on Instagram: @daniellejerniganauthor
This episode features our conversation with Enzo Silon Surin, which was livestreamed on Saturday, April 8, 2023. We talked about their most recent books including When My Body was a Clinched Fist and the forthcoming poetry collection, American Scapegoat.
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born, award-winning poet, educator, librettist, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry and the forthcoming collection, American Scapegoat which will also be published by Black Lawrence Press and will be released in May (which is available for pre-order). He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience which was published by Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022, and the recipient of a New England Poetry Club grant, a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a PEN New England Discovery Award and a 2020 Denis Diderot Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France.
Being a product of two countries, Enzo Silon Surin has dedicated his life and career to affecting social change through creative and critical writing and gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls “broken spaces”.
Surin teaches creative writing and literature at Bunker Hill Community College and is also Founding Editor and Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.
To learn more about Enzo, please visit their website at enzosurinink.org.
Find Enzo on Instagram: @enzothepoet.
This episode features our conversation with Philadelphia’s Dr. Raina J. León, which was livestreamed on Saturday, March 25, 2023 to talk about her expansive body of work.
Dr. Raina J. León is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, artist, digital archivist, podcaster, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts, which celebrates its quince in 2023 and in that time has published nearly 1000 Latinx/Latine voices. She teaches at Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine and cohosts the podcast, Generational Archives, with Dr. Norma D. Thomas.
Raina believes in the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. As an educator of our present and future agitators, Dr. León served as full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, being only the third Black person and the first Afro-Latina to achieve this rank at the institution. In addition to her work as a digital archivist, Dr. León is an emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.
On the podcast, Generational Archives, Drs. Thomas and León present a show where they connect, heal, uncover through intergenerational conversations and archival research. A mother-daughter team, they have been collaborating on writing, facilitation, education projects, and research for ... well all of Raina's life. This podcast explores the closeness of their relationship and how they are together practicing attunement with their ancestors through their ancestral recovery work. They are pushing to learn the forgotten and erased names ... and will teach you how to do that, too!
To learn more about Raina and to purchase copies of her book, please visit her website at rainaleon.com.
Find Raina on Instagram: @rainaleon.
This episode features our conversation with self-help and business author, La’Vista Jones, which was livestreamed on Saturday, March 18, 2023 to talk about her latest book, The BOSS™ Shift.
La’Vista Jones is the founder and CEO of 31 Marketplace, an agency committed to helping women do the work they love, without sacrificing themselves to do it.
As a corporate dropout, turned entrepreneur she is on a mission to challenge women to cultivate their own definition of success and to live life on their own terms. La’Vista is a business consultant, professional speaker, host of the BOSS™ Talk podcast and published author. Her latest book, The BOSS™ Shift which was released in October of 2022, is anchored in implementing her signature framework that focuses on battling overwhelm with systems and self-care.
La’Vista is an Ohio native and bleeds scarlet and gray - go Buckeyes! She’s married to her college sweetheart Stewart and they share their home in Arizona with their son, publicly known as The Cub.
To learn more about La’Vista and to purchase an autographed copy of her book, please visit her website at lavistajones.com.
Find La'Vista on Instagram: @lavistajones
This episode features our conversation with Regine Jackson, which was hosted live at The Artist Cafe in Downtown Springfield, Massachusetts on February 12, 2023.
Regine Jackson is a writer who was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. Born in 1997, Jackson has been an avid reader since she was a child. She always wished to write, specifically stories where the main characters looked like her and the people she interacted with on a daily basis. Jackson’s mother worked as a clerk and a page across different libraries in the city and would bring her back a multitude of books to read. Her favorite genres included science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. She also enjoyed reading graphic novels and comics, including manga. This voracious appetite for escape from her reality would be the eventual start of an interest in putting her own words on paper.
While Jackson mainly writes short stories within the science-fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, she also writes prose and poetry revolving around her life living in the inner city.
Jackson is currently working on the manuscript for her first full-length young adult urban horror novel, as well as planning a YA dark fantasy/horror trilogy series. Having first-hand experience with dealing with trauma, poverty, and inner city violence, and witnessing how drug addiction can ravage a community, she hopes to not only hone her own craft but to bring more creative work to her city and encourage more BIPOC women to write their truths.
Regine is the current Emerging Writer Fellow with Straw Dog Writers Guild which supports women and gender expansive writers of color at the early stages of their career.
Learn more about Regine by visiting: reginejackson.com.
This event was presented in collaboration with Straw Dog Writers Guild which supports writers of all genres and abilities based in the four counties of Western Massachusetts. They provide free or low cost workshops, author readings, and showcases both online and in person. Visit Straw Dog Writers Guild online at strawdogwriters.org to learn about their programs and events.
Special thanks to David Maynard and the staff of The Artist Cafe for not only hosting us but for fostering a community space for us to work, convene, and celebrate the creativity among the Greater Springfield community. The Artist Cafe is a coffee house based in Downtown Springfield. They host a regular live music series, book clubs, and art exhibits. To learn more about them, please visit their website at artcoffeewine.com.
Find Regine on Instagram: @theflimsyquill
Find Straw Dog Writers Guild on Instagram: @strawdogwriters
Find The Artist Cafe on Instagram: @theartistcafema
This episode features our conversation with Shanita Hubbard, which was livestreamed on Sunday, January 29, 2023.
Shanita Hubbard is the author of the book, Ride-Or-Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-Being of Black Women. Her writing has also appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, The Guardian, and more She is also a journalism instructor at the University of Toronto, a Soros Fellow, and the recipient of the La Maison Baldwin Fellowship. Her book, Ride-Or-Die, was published by Legacy Lit Books and released this past November.
To learn more about Shanita, please visit her website at shanitahubbard.com.Find Shanita on Instagram: @professor_nita.
Hubbard's Ride-Or-Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-Being of Black Women is available for purchase via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org.
This episode features our conversations with Tricia Elam Walker
(adult fiction. children's books. plays. short stories. essays.) from Episode Four, Tara Betts (poetry) from Episode Five, and Toni Ann Johnson
(literary fiction--novel. short story.) from Episode Eight - all from Season Three.
We wanted an opportunity to examine how some of our guests approach craft and constructing worlds within specific literary genres. Tricia, Tara, and Toni Ann are not only writers who have written for various platforms and diverse audiences, they are each college educators. So talking with folks who demystify the craft for today’s emerging writers was definitely a way that we wanted to celebrate Black History Month this time around. They each offer unique perspectives on devising characters, exploring and challenging their own genres, and more importantly, examine an African-American experience.
Learn more about our guests featured in this bonus episode:
Tricia Elam Walker
Website: triciaelamwalker.com
IG: @triciawriting
Tara Betts
IG: @tarabettschitown
Toni Ann Johnson
Website: toniannjohnson.com
IG: @treeladytoniann
This episode features our conversation with Lisa Pegram (poetry. nonfiction.), which was livestreamed on Saturday, January 21, 2023.
Lisa Pegram is a writer, arts integration specialist and publishing professional who hails from Washington, DC. She has over 20 years of experience in high-level program design for such organizations as the Smithsonian Institute, Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Geographic. She served as DC WritersCorps program director for a decade, and as co-chair of United Nations affiliate international women’s conferences in the US, India and Bali.
Her endeavors as a literary publicist and acquisitions editor are sparked by a desire to advocate for and amplify underrepresented voices. Lisa completed her MFA in 2012 and has an Executive Certification in Arts & Culture Strategies from UPenn. She is currently working on a family memoir that is a narrative cookbook which explores her life story through the lens of food and music. Exploring the Black diaspora as a way of life, she’s currently based on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten.
To learn more about Lisa and for updates on her work, please follow her on
Instagram: @ladypcoq.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Levee Break Lit.
To access Lisa's recipe mentioned in the episode, please visit the National Museum of Women in the Arts' website.
This episode features our conversation with Mbinguni (historical fiction. women’s fiction. literary fiction), which was livestreamed on Saturday, January 7, 2023, opening up the Spring portion of Season Three.
Mbinguni is a natural storyteller. Born and raised on the barrier island of Fernandina Beach, FL, she's had dreams of writing professionally for as long as she can remember. An avid reader, she began composing her own narratives as a small child in grade school. Mbinguni’s debut novel, Looking for Hopewas released in January of 2021 and published by NEW Reads Publications.
In this coming-of-age tale, Mbinguni weaves a narrative about Hannah “Mouse” Maynard and her transformation from a shy, quiet, girl into a strong and assertive woman.
At 7-years-old, Mouse experiences a tragedy that forces her to face the evils of the world and leave behind everything she’s ever known. With their home destroyed, Mouse and her father travel from Maplewood, Georgia to Virginia and Michigan confronting their past as they move into their future.
Mouse encounters women along the way who help her find the strength to survive and thrive against all she's seen. Through these bonds and their fierce protection, Mouse not only finds her voice but a renewed sense of hope.
Special thanks to Nikesha Elise Williams, who was our guest on Episode 2 of this season, for connecting us with Mbinguni.
To learn more about Mbinguni and her work, please visit Mbinguni.life.
Find Mbinguni on Instagram: @mbinguni.life
Looking for Hope is available for purchase via Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
A bonus episode, Nicole shares what she is reading during her holiday break. Check out her list and read along with her!
Black Writers Read will return in early January of 2023. In the meantime, watch past livestreamed episodes on YouTube or listen to audio podcasts episodes.
Thanks for your ongoing support. Happy Holidays and see you in the new year!
Find us on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Find Nicole on Instagram: @coco_penexplore
Learn more about Nicole and her other work: nicolemyoung.com
This episode features our conversation with Toni Ann Johnson, which was livestreamed on Saturday, December 3, 2022. We talked about her award-winning short story collection, LIGHT SKIN GONE TO WASTE which was published in October. It’s received praise from Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Washington Post.
Toni Ann Johnson won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction with her linked story collection LIGHT SKIN GONE TO WASTE, selected for the prize and edited by Roxane Gay. A novella, HOMEGOING, was published in 2021 after winning Accents Publishing's inaugural novella contest. A novel, REMEDY FOR A BROKEN ANGEL, was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. Johnson won the Humanitas Prize for her teleplays, Ruby Bridges (Disney/ABC), and Crown Heights (Showtime), both of which are based on true stories that examine race relations. She's been a Callaloo Writer's Workshop fellow, and a Sundance Screenwriter's Lab Fellow and she has received support for her writing from The One-Story Summer Conference, The Prague Summer Program for Writers, The Center For Fiction, and The Hurston/Wright Foundation. Johnson currently teaches fiction and screenwriting at Antioch University Los Angeles where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing.
To learn more about Toni Ann and her work, please visit www.toniannjohnson.com.
Special thanks to Amanda Choo Quan for introducing me to Toni Ann.
Find Toni Ann on Instagram: @treeladytoniann
LIGHT SKIN GONE TO WASTE is available for purchase via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org.
This episode features Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere who joined us for the live-streamed episode on November 12, 2022. We talked about her debut historical fiction novel, Finding La Negrita, which was released in September.
Published by Jaded Ibis Press, Finding La Negrita is a captivating retelling of the Black Madonna narrative, which has driven Costa Rica's national and spiritual identity since the 1700s. In powerful prose, Natasha Gordon-Chipembere delivers a vivid and intimate living portrait of slavery in this nation, which was radically different from plantation bondage in other parts of the Americas.
Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere is a professor of African Diasporic literature. She focused her first book on Sarah Baartman in Representation and Black womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (Palgrave 2011). Gordon-Chipembere’s writing has also been published in Essence Magazine along with a monthly series, “Musings from An Afro-Costa Rican” in the Tico Times. She is a Senior Co-editor of the AfroLatin@ Diasporas Book Series from Palgrave, which prioritizes the voices of emerging Afro-Latin@ scholars. Her current writing focuses on slavery and the legacy of Afro-descendants in Latin America. Her historical fiction novel, Finding La Negrita was published by Jaded Ibis Press in September 2022. Gordon-Chipembere is the founder and host of the annual Tengo Sed Writing Retreats in Costa Rica, an exclusive gathering of global BIPOC writers in Costa Rica for a week. She was born in New York to Costa Rican/Panamanian parents and eventually moved to Costa Rica eight years ago with her husband and two children. She is currently working on her next historical fiction novel, Naomi, which is a loose rendering of her great-grandmother's life in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica in the 1940s. To learn more about Natasha and her work, please visit her website at www.natashagordonchipembere.com.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Lisa Pegram and Levee Break Lit.
Find Natasha on Instagram: @natashagordonchipembere
Finding La Negrita is available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org.
This episode features award-winning flash fiction, essay, children's literature author Desiree Cooper, originally live-streamed on November 6, 2022 to kick off Children’s Book Week. During the episode we chatted about her first children’s picture book, Nothing Special, which was released in October.
Published by Wayne State University Press and illustrated by Bec Stone, Nothing Special is a buddy story that spans generations. But it's also a love letter to the black family connections that survived the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South, but they never forgot the culture, the land, and the family they left behind. In the decades since, it’s been a summer ritual for many black families to reverse the journey and return South for a nostalgic visit to their homeplaces. Nothing Special celebrates the enduring connection between the generations who stayed in the South, and the millions of emigrants for whom it will always be home.
Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney, and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, won numerous awards, including 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and River Teeth, among other publications. Her essay, “We Have Lost Too Many Wigs,” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2019. Her first children’s book, Nothing Special, received a starred review from Booklist. After spending her 30-year career in Detroit, she now lives in the Virginia Beach area where she cares for her mother and three grandchildren.
Please be sure to check out the live-streamed episode to see the beautiful illustrations that we discussed during our conversation.
Learn more about Desiree Cooper and her work by visiting: http://www.descooper.com/.
Find Desiree on Instagram: @descooper
Find Nothing Special on Instagram: @nothing_special_book
This episode features poet Dr. Tara Betts, originally live-streamed on October 22, 2022. During the episode we chatted about her newest poetry collection, Refuse to Disappear, which was released in July of 2022.
Refuse to Disappear is a declaration that there are some people who resist by merely existing. In these poems, Tara Betts renders celebrations and tributes to Black women, but also pieces together an anthem that we have survived so much, even if the world pretends to be blind. These poems are a bound collection of love letters to history, music, and people who are denied the chance to speak for themselves.
Dr. Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. In addition to her work as a teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she has taught at several universities, including Rutgers University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois-Chicago, and at Stateville Prison via the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. She is the Inaugural Poet for the People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago. Betts serves as Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and is founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side.
This episode was presented in collaboration with Levee Break Lit. Special thanks to Lisa Pegram and her company for hooking us up with Tara and for your ongoing support of Black Writers Read.
Find Tara on Instagram: @tarabettschitown
This bonus episode features the virtual book launch of author Addie Tsai’s book, Unwieldy Creatures. This special event was livestreamed on August 30, 2022, Mary Shelley’s 225th Birthday as Unwieldy Creatures is a biracial, queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel, Frankenstein.
Joining me for this special event to co-host was horror writer, Tracy Cross. Black Writers Read supporters will remember her as she was our featured guest on Season Two, Episode Four.
Tracy’s forthcoming debut novel, Rootwork, is scheduled for release on November 14 later this year and will be published by MotherHorror’s Dark Heart Publishing. Her book is now available for pre-order.
Based in Washington DC, Tracy is a widely published author. Tracy’s works have appeared in Don’t Break the Oath by Kandisha Press, 99 Tiny Terrors, and anthologies and magazines including Big Book of Bootleg Horror, Things That Go Bump, D’Evolution Z Horror Magazine, Tales of the Lost Vol. 2, and websites midnight & indigo and New American Legends. In 2016, Tracy was awarded the Boston Accent Literary Journal Prize. You can find out more about her at tracycrossonline.com or on Instagram at tracycrosswrites.
Addie, our guest for this episode, is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color who teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities. They are currently a Lecturer of Creative Writing at the College of William & Mary. They taught in Goddard College's MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University’s Mile High MFA Program in Creative Writing. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They hold an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of the young adult novel Dear Twin. Their writing has been published in Foglifter, VIDA Lit, Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. Addie is the Assistant Fiction Editor at Anomaly, Associate Editor at Raising Mothers, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy. Find Addie online at addietsai.com.
This episode is presented in collaboration with BookWoman and Levee Break Lit. BookWoman is a feminist independent bookstore, BookWoman based in Austin, Texas. Addie Tsai has ties to this region as they grew up in Houston and visited BookWoman often. They also hosted a book launch for Tsai’s previous book, Dear Twin. Celebrating 45 years, BookWoman is based on Tonkawa, Comanche and Apache land in Austin, Texas. Founded by a collective, BookWoman hosts a myriad of events including book launches, like this one, book groups, and in-person events. Visit their website at ebookwoman.com.
Special thanks to Lisa Pegram and her literary publicity company, Levee Break Lit, for introducing us to both Addie and BookWoman.
Find Addie on Instagram: @bluejuniper
Purchase your copy of Unwieldy Creatures TODAY!
This episode features award-winning author, educator and recovered lawyer, Tricia Elam Walker, originally live-streamed on October 9 2022. Tricia read excerpts from her children's books, Dream Street and Nana Akua Goes to School. Following her reading, we chatted about her prolific career.
Tricia's novel, Breathing Room, was published by Simon & Schuster/PocketBooks. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Essence and other publications. She has provided commentary for NPR, CNN, the BBC and more.
Tricia’s short stories are included in the O.Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South and other anthologies and her essays are published in Father’s Songs, Dream Me Home Safely, It’s All About Love and more. Several of her plays have been produced and her first children’s book, Nana Akua Goes to School, was published by Random House in June 2020 and won a 2021 Children’s Africana Book Award and the 2021 Ezra Jack Keats writer award. Her second picture book, Dream Street was published in November 2021, garnered five starred reviews and was a New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2021 selection.
Tricia is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University in Washington, DC.
Learn more about Tricia by visiting: www.triciaelamwalker.com.
Find Tricia on Instagram: @triciawriting
This episode features Fiction, Poetry, Narrative Non-Fiction author Nikesha Else Williams, originally live-streamed on October 1, 2022. We met to chat about her new book,Mardi Gras Indians, which was released on October 5, 2022 and published by Louisiana State University Press.
Mardi Gras Indians explores how sacred and secular expressions of Carnival throughout the African diaspora came together in a gumbo-sized melting pot to birth one of the most unique traditions celebrating African culture, Indigenous peoples, and Black Americans. Williams ties together the fragments of the ancient traditions with the expressed experiences of the contemporary. From the sangamentos of the Kongolese and the calumets of the various tribes of the lower
Mississippi River valley to one-on-one interviews with today’s Black masking
tribe members, this book highlights the spirit of resistance and rebellion upon
which this culture was built.
Nikesha Elise Williams is a two-time Emmy award winning producer, an
award-winning author, and producer and host of the Black & Published podcast.
Nikesha’s latest novel, Beyond Bourbon Street, was awarded Best Fiction by the
Black Caucus of African-American Librarians in the 2021 Self-Published eBook
Literary Awards. It also received the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the
National Association of Black Journalists. A Chicago native, Nikesha is an
Editor at Narrative Initiative and a columnist with JAX Today. Her work has
also appeared in The Washington Post, ESSENCE, and VOX. She lives in Florida
with her family where she is working on her next novel.
Learn more about Nikesha and her expansive body of work by visiting: www.newwrites.com.
Listen to the Black & Published bonus episode which chronicles Nikesha's journey to Mardi Gras Indians: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Find Nikesha on Instagram: @nikesha_elise
Find Black & Published on Instagram: @blkandpublished
Find Black & Published on Twitter: @BLKandPublished
This episode features poet Rage Hezekiah. Black Writers Read hosted Rage in person on June 18, 2022 at The LAVA Center in Greenfield, Massachusetts in honor of Juneteenth. We met to chat about her recently released collection of poetry, Yearn, which was a recipient of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest Award.
Rage Hezekiah is a Cave Canem, Ragdale, and MacDowell Fellow who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She is a recipient of the Saint Botolph Emerging Artist Award and she serves as Interviews Editor at The Common. She is the author of Unslakable (Paper Nautilus Press, 2019) and Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Rage’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Cincinnati Review, The Colorado Review, and many other journals and anthologies. You can find more of her work at ragehezekiah.com.
Special thanks to Vanessa Query, Jan Maher, and the team at The LAVA Center for hosting us in person. An even greater thank you to everyone who was able to join us in person at the event.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Greenfield Community Television (GCTV).
Episode 1 of Season Three features St. Clair Detrick-Jules. We met to chat about and celebrate the one-year anniversary of the release of her book, My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood.
St. Clair Detrick-Jules is an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, author, activist, and public speaker. She captures personal stories and intimate moments centering Black liberation, immigrant justice, and women's rights. An Afro-Caribbean artist who remains rooted in her community, St. Clair grounds her work in radical love, joy and the knowledge that a more just world is possible.
St. Clair has a BA from Brown University in French and Francophone Studies. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, BuzzFeed News, The Christian Science Monitor, Byrdie, and NPR's Strange Fruit, among others. Her documentary DACAmented has received awards at Immigration Film Fest, Baltimore International Black Film Festival, Ogden City Latino Film Festival, and Cornell University’s Centrally Isolated Film Festival. Her book, My Beautiful Black Hair, which was published by Chronicle Books in September of 2021, showcases the photographs and stories of Black women embracing their crowns. St. Clair currently resides in her hometown of Washington, DC.
This episode is presented in collaboration with Levee Break Lit. Special thanks to Lisa Pegram and her company for linking us up with St. Clair.
Find St. Clair on Instagram: @stclairdetrickjules
Find St. Clair on Twitter: @stclair_dj
Hear insights on the planned lineup of guests for Season Three of Black Writers Read.
Season Three of the audio podcast premieres on Tuesday, September 20. We'll be joined by filmmaker, photographer, author, activist, and public speaker St. Clair Detrick-Jules.
Please subscribe to be sure to get each episode at its debut.
For more information on Black Writers Read, please visit: https://nicolemyoung.com/projects/black-writers-read/
Find us on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Natasha Marin (non-fiction and conceptual artist) was our guest on Episode 7 of Season 2 of Black Writers Read, which was livestreamed on Juneteenth ~ June 19, 2022.
With cultural origins and connections to Trinadad, Canada, and the United States, Natasha Marin’s people-centered projects have circled the globe since 2012. As a writer, Natasha is represented by Janklow & Nesbit. Natasha has been recognized and acknowledged by Art Forum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, NBC, Al Jazeera, Vice, PBS and others. She is the curator of BLACK IMAGINATION which was published by McSweeney’s in 2020. Excerpts from this book recently appeared in The Paris Review and Poetry Daily. During this episode of Black Writers Read, she read excerpts from Black Imagination and her forthcoming collection, Black Powerful: Black Voices on Black Futures which has already received a significant amount of praise. It was such a privilege to host Natasha for the beginning of her press tour for the book, Black Powerful. Published by McSweeney’s, Black Powerful is out today, September 6 – which is my rationale for sharing this particular episode today.
Thank you so much to Amanda Choo Quan for introducing us to Natasha.
To learn more about Black Powerful and to order your copy, please visit:
https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/black-imagination-black-voices-on-black-futures.
Tracy Cross (horror fiction) was our guest on Episode 4 of Season 2 of Black Writers Read, which was livestreamed on March 26, 2022.
During the episode, Tracy read excerpts from her forthcoming debut novel, Rootwork, which is scheduled for release on November 15, 2022. A widely published author, her works have appeared in Don’t Break the Oath by Kandisha Press, 99 Tiny Terrors, and anthologies and magazines including Big Book of Bootleg Horror, Things That Go Bump, D’Evolution Z Horror Magazine, Tales of the Lost Vol. 2, and websites midnight & indigo and New American Legends. In 2016, Tracy was awarded the Boston Accent Literary Journal Prize. Tracy is based in Washington DC. You can find out more about her at tracycrossonline.com or on Instagram at tracycrosswrites.
Rootwork is available for pre-order by visiting https://darkmattermagazine.shop/collections/books/products/rootwork-conjure-series-1.
This episode of Black Writers Read is presented in collaboration with Break Levee Lit. Special thanks to Lisa Pegram and her company for connecting us with Tracy.
Dorsey Spencer Jr. (fiction - children's picture books) was our guest on Episode 4 of Season 1 of Black Writers Read, which was livestreamed on November 14, 2020.
Dorsey Spencer Jr. is an educator, author and entrepreneur. He is the owner of See Us Fly LLC, an independent publishing company. Dorsey began to write as a way to uplift and highlight the experiences and voices of underrepresented communities. He hopes his work will contribute to the growing body of literature that portrays Black men and boys positively, especially in father-son relationships. Dorsey grew up in Long Island, New York and now lives in central New York with his wife and two children. He has a bachelor’s degree in Sport and Recreation Management from Temple University, a master’s degree in Higher Education Administration from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a doctorate in Higher Education from Florida State University.
During the episode, Dorsey read from his first children’s picture book, Worms are a Yummy Snack A Story of Patience, Anger, and Joy. This delightful story showcases a loving relationship between father and son, and allows parents, caregivers and young readers to positively discuss themes of patience, expression and management of emotions and dealing with failure.
Since joining us for Black Writers Read, Dorsey and See Us Fly LLC has published another children’s picture book, Queen Cara and the Kingdom of Jama’a, which was released on November 15, 2021.
To learn more about Dorsey’s work, please visit seeusfly.com
Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured in Plume, Hobart Pulp, Barrelhouse, Auburn Avenue, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy, The Future of Black, and Plume Poetry 9. She is the author ofSTUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), a chapbook reimagining the life of Nellie Jackson, a Black madam and FBI spy from Natchez, Mississippi. Her first full-length collection, let the dead in (Alan Squire Publishing) was released in Spring 2022. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, Saida is a two time Pushcart Prize Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has received support from the Ruby Artist Grants and the Blue Mountain Center, amongst others.
During the episode, Saida read excerpts from let the dead in. let the dead in is an exploration of the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation. Audacious, sensual, and grieving, this work explores how Black women harness the fantastic to craft their own road to freedom. A journey across Guyana, London, and the United States, it is a meditation on black womanhood, queerness, the legacy of colonization, and pleasure. These poems craft a creation story fat with love, queerness, mermaids, and blackness.
Saida lives online at www.saidaagostini.com.
This episode of Black Writers Read was presented in collaboration with Lisa Pegram and Levee Break Lit.
Saida Agostini (poetry) was our guest on Episode 6 of Season 2 of Black Writers Read, which was live-streamed on May 21, 2022.
Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores the ways Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured in Plume, Hobart Pulp, Barrelhouse, Auburn Avenue, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy, The Future of Black, and Plume Poetry 9. She is the author ofSTUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), a chapbook reimagining the life of Nellie Jackson, a Black madam and FBI spy from Natchez, Mississippi. Her first full-length collection, let the dead in (Alan Squire Publishing) was released in Spring 2022. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, Saida is a two time Pushcart Prize Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist. Her work has received support from the Ruby Artist Grants and the Blue Mountain Center, amongst others.
During the episode, Saida read excerpts from let the dead in. let the dead in is an exploration of the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation. Audacious, sensual, and grieving, this work explores how Black women harness the fantastic to craft their own road to freedom. A journey across Guyana, London, and the United States, it is a meditation on black womanhood, queerness, the legacy of colonization, and pleasure. These poems craft a creation story fat with love, queerness, mermaids, and blackness.
Saida lives online at www.saidaagostini.com.
This episode of Black Writers Read was presented in collaboration with Lisa Pegram and Break Levee Lit.
On July 30, 2022, Black Writers Read, Attack Bear Press, and Radioplasma hosted the virtual book launch of Miguel Bacho's latest poetry collection, Labores. Written in Spanish by Miguel and translated into English by Ramón J. Stern, it was an honor to collaborate on this livestreamed event. This bonus episode features the audio from that event, which includes Miguel and Ramón reading excerpts from the book and my conversation with them.
Labores (Laboring) is the latest poetry collection written by Miguel Bacho. Situated in a period of forced silence, Bacho explores learning the language, working, and observing. Its pages contain part of the struggle, the adventure, and the trip of adapting to a new culture and language, as well as period for drastic changes not just on behavior, but also a deep enhancement of believes.
Miguel Bacho Cabezas was born in Iquique, Chile, in 1986. There, he participated in several local initiatives, such as Literary Caravans to Cochabamba and La Paz, Bolivia in 2010. In 2013, the Universidad Nacional de Lanús Press in Argentina published his first book of poems, Papeles Sueltos. Half of this printing was sent to Iquique’s public Libraries. Between August and October of 2016, Miguel collaborated with the website www.viceversa-mag.com in the section Crónicas Urbanas. He also participated in the Locating Me workshop series, which ended with the printing of a chakpbook with the same title. Miguel has an unpublished nouvelle, Primera Fila, and it’s writing his first novel, Divino Tesoro. His last book of poems Labores, was published in 2022 by Sismo Press in his hometown. He currently resides in Ewing, NJ.
Ramón J. Stern is a translator between Spanish, Portuguese and English (he is also proficient in Hebrew and Arabic) with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. Stern has served as a medical interpreter, translation project specialist and proofreader, admissions reader and as a higher education administrator. His translation, Syrian and Lebanese Patrícios in São Paulo: From the Levant to Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2018), won the Arab-American Non-Fiction Book Award in 2019. He has also translated COVID manuals, research interviews, book chapters, arts magazine articles, human right reports and the bilingual edition of Labores (Laboring) by Miguel Bacho. Stern is currently a Fulbright scholar in Manaus, Brazil researching Moroccan Jewish migration to the Brazilian Amazon.
Special thanks to Jason Montgomery of Attack Bear Press and Iohann Rashi Vega of Radioplasma for coming together to celebrate Miguel and Ramón.
Find Attack Bear Press online: www.attackbearpress.com
Find Radioplasma online: radioplasma.com
Shanta Lee Gander (poetry, prose, journalism, photography) was our guest on Episode 5 of Season 2 of Black Writers Read, which originally aired on April 10, 2022 during National Poetry Month.
Shanta Lee Gander is a photographer, writer across genres and is a public intellectual whose work has been widely featured. She is the author of GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, the winner of the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize with an honorable mention from the Sheila Margaret Motton prize, and reviews featured in the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books, Seven Days, the Kenyon Review, and the The Adroit Journal. Her forthcoming collection, Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023), is what Shanta Lee describes as a 2000+ year old phone line opened to Ovid as well as an interrogation of the Greek mythos while creating her own new language in this work. Black Metamorphoses is an illustrated poetry collection that has been longlisted for the 2021 Idaho poetry prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson prize.
In addition to teaching a Media Studies course at The Putney School, Shanta Lee is one of the writers for the Ms. Magazine Blog, a regular contributor to Art New England and is a producer and reporter for Vermont Public Radio. Her major exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, was on exhibit at the Fleming Museum of Art at the time of our conversation. This exhibition started off as an initial idea and inquiry: Who or what is the Goddess when she is allowed to misbehave?
During the episode, Shanta Lee read an excerpt from GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues.
To learn more about her visual art and written work, visit: Shantaleegander.com.
Find Shanta Lee on Instagram: @mz.shanta_lee
In this bonus episode of Black Writers Read, Nicole M. Young-Martin (our founder, producer, and host) shares a short story she's been working on. This work doesn't have a title yet and Nicole would deeply appreciate some ideas and feedback on both the title and this piece of writing. Initially a poet and playwright, Nicole enjoys exploring other literary genres. She is a fan of young adult fiction and takes her pen to explore the genre in this work. She hopes to submit it for publication in the near future.
Find Nicole on Facebook: www.facebook.com/writercocopenexplore
Find Nicole on Instagram: @coco_penexplore
Aprell May (urban creative non fiction. journalism) was our guest on the first episode of Season 2 of Black Writers Read, which originally aired on November 14, 2021.
Previously a Salon Owner, Aprell May graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Bay Path University in 2021. She is a seventh generation storyteller coming from a proud lineage of family members and ancestors who could hold an audience with compelling words, prose, and narration. Her poetry collection, Expose Such a Life, which was published in 2017, is available on Amazon. On this episode, Aprell May read essays from her not yet published memoir, Classic Fly written as urban creative nonfiction. When she is not spending time with her wonderful daughter and dogs Bentley and Lolaisha, Aprell May loves writing about her fascination with food, culture, adventure, social justice and family! Based in Springfield, MA, Aprell May currently serves as a trending and breaking news reporter for The Republican, a newspaper based in Western Massachusetts.
Find Aprell May on Instagram: @aprellmaydaily
Poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer Kaija Langley was our very first guest on Black Writers Read, which was originally livestreamed in September of 2020. Born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Kaija Langley has been writing since she fell in love with words at age seven. She knew she was onto something when she wrote her first poem and her grade school classmates thought she'd copied it from a book! A proud alumna of Morgan State University, a Historically Black College and University in Baltimore, MD, she received her MFA in Fiction from St. Mary's College of California in 2005. She's called many places home over the years -- New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, DC, California, Louisiana -- and currently lives, writes, and plays in Cambridge, MA with her two bonsai and her Beloved.
During the episode, Kaija read from the first chapter of non-yet-published Middle Grade Novel, Call Me Early, is a coming-of-age story about a Black 12 year old girl who spends her summer unexpectedly straddling family, friendship, and identity. Since appearing on Black Writers Read, Kaija’s debut children's picture book, When Langston Dances, was published in the fall of 2021, exactly a year later following her conversation with Black Writers Read. When Langston Dances was nominated for a 53rd NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Literary Work for Children. Other nominees in this category include Amanda Gorman, Stacy Abrams, and Misty Copeland. Kaija’s debut Middle Grade novel, The Order of Things is slated for release in 2023 and will be published by Nancy Paulsen Books. Her second children’s picture book, A Century for Caroline, scheduled for publication in 2024.
Find Kaija on Instagram: @kaijalangley
Memoirist and essayist Shannon Luders-Manuel joined us for Episode 7 of Season One of Black Writers Read. Shannon Luders-Manuel is a West Coast writer, editor, and sensitivity reader. She received her master's in English literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Real Simple, among others. She is currently represented by Chase Literary Agency for her memoir about growing up mixed race, coming in and out of conservative Christianity, and her complicated relationship with her absent, alcoholic father. During this episode, Shannon read from her essay, "Rediscovering My Father," which was published in the New York Times in 2019.
To read the essay in its entirety, please visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/well/family/memory-photos-family-alcoholism.html.
Find Shannon on Instagram: @shannon_luders_manuel
In this bonus episode of Black Writers Read, hear from Nicole M. Young-Martin, the person behind the scenes about herself, career, and the reason(s) behind Black Writers Read.
Originally from Detroit, Nicole M. Young-Martin (she/her) is a performance poet, playwright, events curator, and nonprofit professional. Nicole has called New England "home" for over 15 years. As a performance poet, she has performed her work in over 20 venues in various states including Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan opening for musicians and other spoken word artists. Her award-winning play, get (t)his! has been produced by fringe and one-act festivals in her hometown and in New York City. In 2019, Nicole released a self-produced spoken word album, In/Put: Live from the Valley, which was recorded in front of a live audience. As an educator, she has taught composition, developmental writing, and Theatre at several colleges and universities and is a regularly sought-after writing workshop facilitator.
Find Nicole on Facebook: www.facebook.com/writercocopenexplore
Find Nicole on Instagram: @coco_penexplore
Margo Gabriel (food, travel, culture, wine, music, art, lifestyle, self-care) joined us for Episode Two of Season Two (December 4, 2021) of the livestreamed series of Black Writers Read. She read the opening essay, Where Food, Culture and People Meet, from her debut cookbook, The Expat Kitchen. We also chatted about her expansive writing career.
To learn more about Margo and her work, visit https://margoscreativelife.com/.
Historian, essayist, and nonfiction writer, Dr. Khary Oronde Polk joined us for Episode 3 of Season Two of Black Writers Read. An Associate Professor of Black Studies & Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, Dr. Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948 published by University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Contagions of Empire examines how the movement of Black soldiers and nurses around the world in the early-to-mid twentieth century challenged U.S. military ideals of race, nation, sexuality and honor.
Polk has written for the Studio Museum of Harlem, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, The Journal of Negro History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Gawker, and the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. He has also contributed essays to a number of queer of color anthologies, including If We Have To Take Tomorrow, Corpus, and Think Again. Polk is a member of the African Atlantic Research Group, the Critical Militarization Editorial Collective, and recently held a visiting professorship at the JFK Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. During this episode, Dr. Polk read from his new essay/project, "Spacewalking in the Archive: Transatlantic Black Feminist Lives" To read the essay in its entirety, please visit: https://www.interimpoetics.org/384/khary-oronde-polk/.
Find Dr. Khary Oronde Polk on Twitter: @kharypolk.
Launched during the fall of 2020 as a livestreamed series, Black Writers Read was created as a platform to showcase, celebrate, and honor the words, work and traditions of Black writers from across the country, across genres, across experiences and across the African Diaspora. The livestreamed series is now wrapping up Season Two. Beginning with Season Three, Black Writers Read will be presented as both a livestreamed series and audio podcast, first airing the livestreamed episode online. After the episode has aired, supporters will be able to listen to Black Writers Read from their preferred audio podcast platform.
Produced and hosted by performance poet, playwright, and events curator, Nicole M. Young-Martin, Black Writers Read presents a different author each episode who shares excerpts from their work and is then interviewed by Nicole about their work and how they seek to shift and influence the larger literary canon.
To learn more about Black Writers Read and your producer and host, please visit www.nicolemyoung.com.
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread.
Watch past episodes of Black Writers Read on YouTube.