Black Writers Read – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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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
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Find Black Writers Read online: blackwritersread.com

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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
Find Reed, Write & Create on Instagram: @reedwriteandcre8
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

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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 Bullpen 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 Bullpen is 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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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 visit lisabraxton.com. 

Find Lisa on Instagram: @lisabraxtonwrites

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: blackwritersread.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.

Find Kisha on Instagram:  @kishaandscad

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Visit Black Writers Read online: blackwritersread.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.

Find David on Instagram: @davidjacksonambrose

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: blackwritersread.com 

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This episode features our conversation with Lynne 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.

Find Lynne on Instagram: @letpms
Find Perugia Press on Instagram: @perugiapress
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

To support getting our authors' books on Black Writers Read bookshelves, please visit our GoFundMe page.

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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.

Find Nzadi on Instagram: @nzadikeita

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Visit our website: www.blackwritersread.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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