1. New on the podcast in June

2. Continued conversations

3. One from the archive

4. Coming in July

New on the podcast in June

New episodes of the Additions to the Archive podcast drop every Tuesday. By subscribing wherever you get your podcasts, you will never miss an episode. But here’s a recap, just in case.

I was thrilled to be in real life conversation with guest, Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor when she was in New York City for the launch of her book, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me. After such a thoughtful conversation on the pod about her scholarship around the n-word and her relationship with her father, the legendary comedian Richard Pryor, it was great to have a chance to go even deeper with her before a live audience.

If you’re looking for a summer fiction read, check out my spoiler-free conversation with screenwriter and author Kyra Davis Lurie about The Great Mann, her reimagining of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, The Great Gatsby.

I love meeting new people through their books, but it’s nice to welcome old friends back too. It was great to have performance scholar, Dr. Cheryl Thompson back to the podcast in June to discuss the follow up to Canada and the Black Atlantic, Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898–1919.

I am frequently inspired by the work of independent historians. One of those historians is Eric K. Washington, whose latest project, Where Harlem Rests at the Woodlawn Cemetery, made for a fascinating discussion, not just of New York City history, but about the nature of museums and the preservation of memory.

Finally, I was excited to speak with Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston about her latest book, Praisesong for the People: Poems From the Heart and Soul of Texas, on the eve of the 20th Anniversary of the organization she founded: Torch Literary Arts, amplifying Black women writers.

Continued Conversations

Podcast guests and I usually find ourselves continuing our conversation long after I hit “stop” on the podcast recording. When that happens, we take our discussion over here to Substack.

I was thrilled to get further reading recommendations from author and public historian Eric K. Washington, who recommended several great biographies of Harlem Renaissance-era figures, all of whom feature in his project pamphlet, Where Harlem Rests at the Woodlawn Cemetery.

Summer 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Torch Literary Arts, an organization founded to elevate and support Black women writers. Its founder, Amanda Johnston, chatted with me about what it takes to build a literary legacy.

One from the Archive

July is upon us, and that means an abundance of semiquincentennial celebrations, especially in US history circles. I keep thinking about my conversation with diplomatic historian, Dr. Ronald Johnson, and his book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.

Coming in July

We’re going to sizzle in July on the podcast, with an exploration into Gullah-Geechee culture in Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies with Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim and Dr. Elizabeth West. Award-winning poet Phillip B. Williams will be on the pod talking about his new collection, Lift Every Voice. And summer is the time to be outdoors! And we will do so with Maria Pinto, talking about her groundbreaking book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, and Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery, talking about When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy. Find all this, and more, wherever you get your podcasts.

Sullivan Summer: Talk about starting a literary organization. What did that look like 20 years ago?

Amanda Johnston: Oh my gosh. It was literally me sitting in my house with two friends and we had been gathering to write together. I was like, what if we made a space where other folks could come and share their work? What if we started this online magazine? And both of them, with love, said no—I’ve got family, kids, you know, work, I can’t commit to doing something like that. And I said, okay. But it wouldn’t leave me.

That is something that folks will often hear me talk about—divine or whatever your belief systems are, I feel a pull. And I just say, that’s the ancestors. My granny and the universe that are saying, like, you got to do stuff. And back then, I mean, my granny was still with us and would just encourage me, you know, to go for it, go after it, but it wouldn’t leave me. So I said, I know my friends declined, but I think I can still just do this.

I didn’t put a lot of pressure on myself for it to become what it is now. That grew over 20 years, 15 years, you know, and then since our relaunch [in 2022] to where we are today. But that first impulse was like, no, I want this, and we deserve this, so I’m going to do it.

You know, everything that we do is an attempt. You actually don’t know how it’s going to end up until you get there. So I made the attempt by making the website and putting out the call to for submissions.

Being a writer, I knew a lot of writers. I was connected to fellowships. I mentioned [in the Additions to the Archive podcast interview] the Cave Canem poets and being a fellow there. The Affrilachian Poets was also one of my first homes.

Summer: [Affrilachian Poets co-founder] Frank X Walker has been on the podcast too.

Johnston: Oh, yes. Love Frank. Frank, you know, he’ll tell folks he found me writing poems on the sides of trees in Kentucky; just a little baby poet. That’s another story. But I knew enough folks that I knew it could reach its intended audience just through my network and community. And that could be enough.

But I quickly saw once it was out—Oh, we all need this. And the submissions started to come. And then it was just, you know, staying committed. I think that’s the biggest difference in anything being a success is, do you stick with it? I think it was Baldwin who was talking about so many talented writers that we’ll never hear about because beyond talent, you have to stay consistent and committed to your work. So whatever was in me that wouldn’t let it go, I couldn’t let it go. And I still haven’t.

Summer: Talk about your vision when you started. And what I mean by that is, when you had the idea, did you sit down and think, okay, in 20 years we’ll be celebrating its 20^th anniversary?

Johnston: I did not have that vision.

Summer: Yeah, because I can’t imagine anyone would ever start anything if they had that pressure.

Johnston: No. I did not have that vision. I had the vision of having an online magazine, and I made it. Then through that, for me, all of the work, no matter if it’s my poetry, my organizing, arts administration, my visual art, anything that I’m doing, what I care most about and what’s at the core of it, past my own creativity and exploration, is community. If it’s bringing people together, then that’s the vision.

This very specifically is for Black women writers, and Black women writers are sending their work in and are proud of their work and now aspire to be featured in Torch Magazine. You get that. We know what a big “Yes” does for you. So many times, Torch is someone’s first big “Yes.” That was the vision. I wanted to spread that. I wanted to give that to us because we know we were not, and still aren’t, receiving that equitably. And now with the erasure and current politics and priorities and racist, sexist attitudes aflare everywhere, it is eroding the gains that we did make in looking for an equitable life and access to sharing our creative expression, whatever that looks like. So we need it all the more now. It’s not taking away the fact that we need Torch. It’s proving why we need it more. But yeah, that was the vision, to have a space for us. And we did that.

Johnston: How Torch has grown has been the commitment that also comes with listening and saying, okay, what else is needed? Because when you’re starting something, you have to be able to: (A) know you don’t know everything; and (B) know you’re always going to be in some lane of figuring it out. So you have to be able to make an attempt, learn from it, and pivot if it’s not going the way that you had hoped it would. It doesn’t mean, okay, fold it up. We tried and now we don’t have it. It means, okay, no, that old web server is not holding this anymore—what else is out there? That’s one of the things we’re working on; our archive right now. Torch has been on like four different platforms and all that data and pages are just kind of loose on a backup drive. And so how do we now translate that so people can still engage and see that work, right? So yeah, being flexible, but staying committed and knowing who you are and what your mission is.

For us, it starts with me. Why am I doing this? Because I love us. I love Black women. I’m a Black woman writer and I want us to have everything. We deserve everything and we don’t have to wait for people to give us what we deserve. We can actually make it for ourselves. And so that’s what Torch is: the making of what we deserve and giving it to ourselves.

Our mission at Torch is very literal: to support and amplify Black women writers, to preserve our work for education and prosperity, to create advancement opportunities for Black women through literary arts. That’s our mission. So now we’re in a time where folks are saying, oh, if you want to be considered for this grant, you can’t do DEI. And that sounds like DEI. Well, that doesn’t rule what we do. So we’re not changing our mission.

We know words have meaning. It’s not as simple as just changing a few words. We’re not changing our mission. We’re staying true to who we are and trusting that the people who are looking for that will find us. We can feed into them, support them, and funders and supporters will support and fund this work.

Now that’s the other thing. People ask me like, well—so offensive, sorry—folks will say, just Black women? Just? Oh, no, no, no, no.

Summer: (laughing) What about the white guys?

Johnston: It’s not just white guys. But, why don’t you say “BIPOC?” Why don’t you say “POC?” Why don’t you say something else that is more palatable to people who don’t want to say “Black?” But it is for Black women. And being intentional, we do have a DEI statement that is still on our website. And when you read that very intentionally, it talks about Black women and our intersecting identities. Because we know there are people in our community who do identify as part of the spectrum of Black womanness, that have different pronouns and express their identities, and have different identities, but still are here in our community, right? People have questions about Blackness. I can’t tell you who you are. I would say if you’re asking that question, sit with that. You go on and sit with that, but Black women know what we’re saying and find us and submit their work to us.

So yeah, knowing who you are, knowing what you do, not changing those things ever, but being able to be flexible and pivot through what comes so that you can continue that work. Anyone starting anything should have that. If you’re going to hit one road bump and say, oh, that’s it, cash it in, we’re done, then yeah, you’re going to have a really hard go of it.

And not everybody has to be the one to start something. There are a lot of great things that already exist and they need your support and they want you to be involved. So if that’s not something that you can commit to—because I also look at Torch as a promise to Black women that we’re not breaking.

So when we made that decision not to close [during the pandemic] and to relaunch and go bigger, the very next conversation we had was about succession. One day I won’t be Executive Director. One day there will be a whole new group of folks who lead and need Torch, right? How are we setting it up so that it’s for them? That’s a different level of institution building that is not a hobby and is not a passion project, right? Not everybody wants to do that work. And that’s okay. Go be a part of the organizations that you love, receive the resources and benefits, and feed into them. Writers need readers too. So if you’re reading this and you think, I’m not a writer—read. Read Torch Magazine. It’s free, no paywall. We need readers and these great stories and poems are for everyone.

Read Torch Magazine

I want to say one more thing. I don’t want anyone to think I’m suffering from toxic positivity. Cause I do often talk about running towards the love and the joy and the light, right? But that is where my fierce fight comes from. If you know what you’re against, you have to understand even more what you’re for. Because then how do you know when you’ve achieved it? How do you know when you’re there? I don’t wanna fight. It’s not forever, but the fight is here, so here we go. And so what does my fight look like? It looks like leaning into and loving on my people, on my sisters. I’m offering a soft space when the rest of the world is hard, right? This work is work, but when we come together to do it on and off the page—Oh my! What a beautiful and joyful space we get to have. I’m here for that, I’m here for all of that.

Eric’s project, and the accompanying tour, is a fabulous primer on the extraordinary lives of the people profiled. Fortunately, several of those people have also been the subject of full biographies, and Eric was kind enough to share a recommended reading list for those wanting to learn more.

Follow Eric on Substack

1. What—there’s a newsletter?

2. As Seen In

3. New on the podcast in May

4. Continued conversations

5. One from the archive

6. Coming in June

The Additions to the Archive Newsletter

The Additions to the Archive Substack has been live now for just over one year, and I have been welcoming Black authors to the podcast to discuss their works of history, literature, and criticism for just as long. With a robust and growing cache of interviews across both platforms, it feels like a good time to begin sending a proper newsletter to subscribers. While I will continue to publish author Q&As several times per month on Substack, I will move to sending emails only on the last Friday of every month with a round-up of podcast interviews, Q&As, as well as a look to what’s ahead.

As Seen In

Speaking of newsletters, Additions to the Archive was featured in the New Books Network’s May 21, 2026 newsletter. Check it out!

New on the podcast in May

New episodes of the Additions to the Archive podcast drop every Tuesday. By subscribing wherever you get your podcasts, you will never miss an episode. But here’s a recap, just in case.

Every so often, I have the pleasure of meeting the authors I’ve interviewed on the pod. I had one such meeting on May 19 at the Strand Bookstore NYC launch event for Dr. Steven Thrasher’s The Overseer Class: A Manifesto, an unflinching exploration into what it means for minoritized people to rise to the top of the country’s most entrenched institutions.

Lovers of art and literature will be interested in a nuanced discussion about its impact on racialized myth-making in Dr. Jason Young’s The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War.

If film is your pop culture jam, check out my interview with Es-Pranza Humphrey, curator at New York City’s Poster House museum, as we dove into her new exhibition, Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen, on now through September 2, 2026.

It was a very personal discussion about family, and the limits imposed on our ability to legibly translate the stories of ourselves and our ancestors in a discussion of chaun webster’s Without Terminus: Untraining an Archive.

And I had one more book that wrestled with a family archive this month, with the release of Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. by Dr. Lerone Martin, a compelling first-time look at King’s adolescent years.

Continued conversations

Podcast guests and I usually find ourselves continuing our conversation long after I hit “stop” on the podcast recording. When that happens, we take our discussion over here to Substack.

In May, University of Michigan Professor of History, Dr. Jason Young and I talked about what it’s like to engage in art and literary criticism as a historian, as well as why he considers his book, The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War a “lover letter” to the Black community.

I was also fascinated to discuss with Stanford’s Dr. Lerone Martin his impressions of a young Coretta Scott, before she became Coretta Scott King, and how he’s thinking about adapting his King biography into a graphic novel for young readers.

And two-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for poetry, chaun webster, went deep on a discussion of literary form and craft.

One from the Archive

Seeing Es-pranza Humphrey’s Act Black exhibition at Poster House got me thinking about my April 25, 2025 interview with Hollywood historian, Ben Arogundade about his book Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Recognition in a White Hollywood, where he chronicles the history of nominations for Black and other minority creatives.

Coming in June

We’ve got more great discussions coming to the archive in June, including a deeply personal one with historian Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor about her cultural analysis and memoir, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me; a return visit from historian and performance studies scholar Dr. Cheryl Thompson to talk about her follow-up to 2025’s Canada and the Blackface Atlantic, Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation 1898-1919; a look at the people who made the Harlem Renaissance with public historian Eric K. Washington; twenty years of amplifying Black women writers with Texas Poet Laureate and the founder of Torch Literary Arts, Amanda Johnston; and a bit of summer fiction with New York Times bestselling author and screenwriter Kyra Davis Lurie, as we discuss her retelling of an American classic in The Great Mann.

This conversation ends with the list of works chaun and I discussed during our podcast episode.

chaun webster: I think poets get described as using “form” a lot more, right? There’s a number of poets that influenced me and my own work as a poet with exploring form. But it’s definitely not isolated to one genre. I think we’re all writing in a form. Because there is perhaps more of a familiarity with certain kinds of form, there’s a way that it fades into the background and that it is not as legible to us; there’s a way that it’s been universalized. Or there’s a way that we share a certain kind of grammar around it, that as soon as something deviates from that, then we’re saying it’s doing something with form, right? It’s all—we’re all doing something with form. But I think there are ways that certain things announce themselves as doing something with form differently than others.

When I think about why love Renee Gladman’s work so much, it is the deep level of thought that she’s bringing to her consideration of the line, her consideration of the sentence. And also how that transforms itself into a kind of drawing over time she calls “prose architectures.” I’m really curious about how that form for Gladman, in terms of the drawing, was able to do something that traced her thought in ways that writing couldn’t. She was talking about how writing was always this retrospective thing; that writing was always following her thought. Whereas there was something that could happen in a more parallel relationship between the drawing and her thought; that she could feel a thing out as she was drawing it. She could think a thing out in the drawing of it. And I’m interested in the way that form becomes a kind of an instrument of her thinking in that way.

There are novelists that do this as well, right? I love [James] Baldwin. I can’t get enough of Go Tell It on the Mountain, because of the way that Baldwin does something with the sentence that I think stretches it, stretches it in a way that the Black rhetorical tradition has always stretched it, that Black orality stretches it.

When reading Go Tell It on the Mountain, there is an attentiveness to the breathing, right? Like, there’s an attentiveness to the way that his paragraph-long sentence, in its many, many commas, stretches our breathing. It does so in the same way as I might think of a sermon being delivered; the kind of breath that’s entering into the space of a sermon in its articulation. He’s certainly not the first to do it; he’s not the only to do it, but there’s something about the way Baldwin writes sentences that captures something—a Black sound that’s really special. There’s something about the way Baldwin transforms the form of the sentence that makes room for Black orality. I really appreciate that about his work.

I think that looking at Doug Kearney’s work for the first time—when I saw The Black Automaton for the first time, and I heard him perform it in 2012—prior to that moment, I think that I felt like I had reached a limit, like me in my own naivety and perhaps my own arrogance thought I had reached the limits of poetry; like I didn’t know if poetry was going to be able to do anything more for what my own interests were. And then I heard Doug Kearney perform and I looked at that book and saw the way—not only was he doing something that layered sound, there was also this way that he was tracing thought, perhaps similar to the ways that I was describing with Renee Gladman, where we have these multiple trains of thought that are moving at the same time; it was something that [Kearney] was able to demonstrate on the page visually. That was one of the first encounters that I had with that in poetry.

Then I was able to make those connections with what I had already seen and known in terms of graffiti, or what I had already understood in relation to certain visual art that was really attractive to me. And so I was able to find these spaces and pockets of form in these other avenues, like in Without Terminus, I talk about the work of Caroline Kent as an artist; artists like Kenyatta A.C. Henkel, who are both very important to me and my own thinking and work. But both of them think deeply about language. Caroline Kent is attempting to abstract language and create a kind of visual syntax for it in her abstract paintings. I’m interested in, like, what’s happening in the space of that abstraction?

And maybe everything is tongues to me in some way, because I’m always finding them in some manner. And so, even though Doug Kearney would talk about what he’s doing in The Black Automaton and his other work as “performance typography” is a language that he’s kind of coined for it, because my own tradition, the tradition that I was raised in was in the space of the church, I look at what I’m doing with the super imposition of text and the way that I’m exploding margins and, like, the way that language is running off the page, I’m looking at that more in relationship to tongues. Because that’s something that was familiar to me in my own upbringing.

And then come to find it that, like, you know, Harryette Mullen had already written about these things in “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” right? She had already written about the way that, throughout the diaspora, there had always been these moments in which there’s these writing practices. The word for speaking in tongues, it’s called “glossolalia,” but there’s also these practices of writing where one would believe that they were writing something with, from the spirit that was illegible, that they call “glossographia.” And, you know, I’m interested in that space in my own work. There’s some specific writing that I do about that in Without Terminus.

Form is like, I mean, it’s this beautiful, magical thing. I took a class in during my MFA program, this wonderful friend and someone whose work I really appreciate, Lara Mimosa Montes, who taught this class called Form and Formlessness, and the books that she chose, and the discussions that we had—I feel like, where else was I going to be able to read Renee Gladman and Jenny Bouly’s, The Body: An Essay, but also Mirene Arsanios’ The Autobiography of a Language, all at the same time? And the conversations were just quite incredible. In that class, she talked a lot about this relationship between form and formlessness, and that formlessness itself was a kind of form; that there is a kind of form to that formlessness; that what we identify as formlessness— perhaps it’s just got its own set of terms around the form that it’s taking.

I also am very, very interested in form. I’m interested in how to outrun language in some ways. I feel limited by language. I think that’s Derek Walcott: “all the bastards left us is words.”1 And so how do you make clear that colonial relationship to language in a way that de-naturalizes it? How do we make apparent that language—which can become so ubiquitous, and we can have all these romantic notions around what’s being described, knowing not typically is it that folks, when they talk about trains [as in Without Terminus] are thinking about violence? Not typically when people think about trains, are they thinking about colonialism? Not typically when people think about trains, are they thinking about unmarked graves and stolen land? And yet, the train is all those things. The train is deeply wedded to these settler colonial, anti-Black forms of violence. And the porter is like an extension of that fantasy of the slavocracy, and who was the servant and who had the right to be the master in that sense, and be served and waited on, and they’re in the sleeping car, and yet, they never get rest. As a matter of fact, sometimes they’re sleeping with the luggage, and so to the extent that they got any rest, as a matter of fact, the luggage had more rights in the space of that train car than my grandfather.

I think that I’m interested in, how can you demonstrate that in form? And in some ways, the prose block that I use is attempting to consider constraint, is attempting to consider what someone like my grandfather had to fit themselves into, both physically in the sense of the small space of the train car, but also the way that he had to comport himself aboard the train. Like the way that in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Harriet Jacobs, how you’re seeing someone who’s having to fit themselves into the space of their grandmother’s attic for seven years.

On one level, that can be a “loophole of a retreat,” as she calls it—and I don’t wish to do anything to diminish that—and at the same time, I think what is less described is the ways that she talks about the horror of that space. Like, she talks about the irreparable damage it does to her body, right? Even as she was writing the words that we read in Incidents in the Life of the Slave Girl, that she may have been in bodily pain sitting, writing those things, or dictating them, right? All of those things take up some consideration of form, right?

I think it’s perhaps something that I’ll be attempting to wrestle with and work through for as long as I’m writing, you know? And failure’s wrapped up in that. I taught a class actually this last semester that I called, Tentative Lines on the Poetics of Failure. It was a class where I was thinking about how writers like, for instance, Bhanu Kapil in the writing of Schizophrene, where she’s attempting to write about partition, right? How she writes it all down in a notebook, like finishes the book, but then sees that it’s failed; like, it’s a project that there is no way to think about a linear cohesion to partition. So she throws it in the snow and then takes in the spring that notebook out of the snow and from the fragments, that is what becomes the basis for Schizophrene, right? It’s the remnants, the ruins of that failed project. And so I think in some ways, like, you know, I’m always trying to look into the ruins of my own writing and see what remains from all of those failed attempts at putting something together.

In our Additions to the Archive podcast conversation, chaun referenced:

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (2023)

Mary-Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment (2018)

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)

Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath (2016)

M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2008)

Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989)

Doug Kearney’s latest work is Sho (2021)

Fred Moten, Black and Blur (2017)

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004)

chaun webster, GeNtry!fication: Or the Scene of the Crime (2018)

chaun webster, Wail Song: Or Wading in the Water at the End of the World (2023)

Check out Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen, curated by Es-pranza Humphrey, at New York City’s Poster House through September 6, 2026.

The book, which focuses on King’s adolescent years, closes around the time of a 24-year-old ML’s marriage to Coretta Scott. And it is here where Lerone and I pick up our conversation.

Lerone Martin: I think in writing this book, the thing that really impressed me the most in listening to Coretta—and I tried to use mostly Coretta’s recollections of their dating experience to give her voice of her experience—I think in listening to her, I was just so amazed at how gifted she was. She doesn’t really receive enough credit for the impact that she had on his life. And that’s why, you know, there’s such a long part of the book at the end focusing on her. I think it’s the longest chapter in the book because she’s actually more of an activist and has most of this thought out long before King does.

It’s in meeting her and their first date where she says—he picks her up and she says she’s so unimpressed. She says he pulls up in this green Chevy and she says, Oh my God, that’s a small car and he fits really well in that car. And this is not going to go well. She jokingly says, you know, she tells him later on in an interview, she says, You know, Martin, I was really considering not getting in that car. I was just going to let you keep on driving when you pulled up in that car. She says she gets in the car, she looks him up and down and she’s like, he is so unimpressive looking.

Martin: But in sitting down and talking with him on that first date, she says it’s like he became handsome in front of her because he starts telling her how he wants to serve, how he wants to put Jim Crow on its deathbed, how he wants to serve other people. He wants to make sure people who are poor are served. She says he becomes handsome right in front of her.

And it’s because he’s speaking the kind of language of what she’s already committed her life to. She’s already further along in that journey. She’s already participated in nonviolent campaigns. She’s protested while at Antioch College. She’s gone to political conventions. She’s so involved. And in fact, King will say in an interview, someone asked him years later, Did you have to teach Coretta all this stuff? And King will say, quote, I wish for my masculine ego’s sake that I could say yes, that I taught her, but in many ways she taught me.

The reason why I’m so attracted and so impressed by that is that it’s part of the reason why she’s attracted to him and why he’s so attracted to her. Because he realizes that this is a brilliant woman who has done and is committed to some of the things that he hopes to do in the future.

So their partnership, it is a story about romance, but it’s also a story about true partnership. I was just so thankful that Coretta gave interviews, published and unpublished, and talked about it because it’s really a beautiful love story that goes beyond just physical attraction. It was a joy to be able to chronicle that. I’m forever grateful to her for just being so honest about their impressions and their dating experience.

Sullivan Summer: It is one of the things that I really appreciated about the book—the women in this book. All of the women in [King’s] life, from his mother and his grandmother, all the way to the women that he dates, are so fully and wholly and completely rendered as complex and intelligent human beings. I really appreciated it.

Martin: Thank you. Thank you. And that’s another moment where my own biography—because I’ve benefited from so many amazing women who have just schooled me and mentored me, taught me; from my mother, my three older sisters, my professors, and now my wife. I know that I’ve benefited from them so much.

Before I started writing this book, I had the benefit of reading another great book by a Stanford alum named Anna Tubbs called The Three Mothers.1 That book chronicles the role of the mothers of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin, and how their mothers shaped those gentlemen. Reading that book really primed me to say like, I need to point out the women in King’s life, in addition to Alberta, his mother, but all the women who poured into him throughout his life. I need to pay attention to that, because those women get left off of the story. And they’re so important. Whether it’s the librarian who’s letting him check out books when he’s not supposed to; if it’s his grandmother; the women that he dates; Coretta; his high school teachers who help him with public speaking; there’s so many amazing women in his life that pour into him and shape him and help give us the the Martin Luther King Jr. we got to experience.

Summer: Now you’re working on a graphic novel version of Young King. How did that come about?

Martin: You know, in thinking about this book, in thinking about the multiple audiences, it was an opportunity where we thought, you know, parents will enjoy this, right?—reading about a youngster, older adults who know him as an icon. But we also thought, what about the kids? And we thought about this in part because I do have a one and a half year old, an 11 year old, and a 15 year old, and we thought about them. Like, do they know this information that their dad is working on? And they don’t. They don’t know that King was a youngster. They don’t know because I hadn’t written and a book, but also because I’m their dad and pretty much when I start talking about King roll their eyes and stop listening.

Martin & Summer: [laughing]

Martin: You know, what young adults—and even increasingly middle school, high school—really love is graphic novels. So, like, they may not pick up a 300 page book, but they’ll pick up a graphic novel. The success of John Lewis and March2 and other graphic novels I think signaled to us that there was an opportunity here to do this.

I’ve never done it before. It’ll be a first-time experience for me. But that’s how it came about. We just thought, this story is so important that young adults need to hear it in a way that’s not, you know, just a small story about King being in elementary school and going on to be this great speaker. We need to have a graphic novel just about him being young, and not a graphic novel that goes up to him being, you know, this amazing adult.

Summer: How are you approaching what is essentially an adaptation, right? You’re adapting your own work. Talk about that process.

Martin: I have never done this before, so I thought the best way to do this would be to do some market research, if you will. I started with my own fifth grader. I was invited to Benjamin’s fifth grade class to talk about Martin Luther King Jr., so I told them a little bit about Young King and, you know, what King was going through when he was 10 and 11 years old, and they really found that interesting.

Then I flipped it; they really came alive and I thought, you know, now I want to hear from you. If I were to make what I just told you into a graphic novel, what would that look like? I pulled out my pen and pencil and those kids came alive and gave me the best advice about what they would like to see in a graphic novel. They gave me sticky notes where they wrote things down, because they were all raising their hands and I couldn’t get to them, including Benjamin, my son, and I was like, dude, like we can talk at home. Like, you don’t talk this much to me at home. Why now are you talking to me in front of all your friends?

Summer: Because it turns out you’re popular.

Martin: He was like, wait a minute—like this dude is actually cool. He’s not just a dude that makes me make up my bed, right?

So anyway, they gave me great advice. I’m looking at the notes now. They said they thought that it should be a suspenseful opening, you know, make it suspenseful. They like seeing that.

Summer: So they gave you craft notes!

Martin: They give me craft notes.

Summer: Okay.

Martin: Oh yeah. That it’s important to include the ups and downs. They like graphic novels that show characters that have ups and downs and not a linear life. They wanted to keep it suspenseful, keep it moving, right? That the pictures should, the graphic novel should depict momentum and not, like, be the same clothes, the same place, the same time; include lots of perspectives. So maybe not just King, but also maybe the perspective of his father, mother, friends. They gave me that. Interestingly enough, they said depictions of weather; that if you’re going to really drive home that it’s a graphic novel, that it should depict context. So like a place and weather and context.

This little, a note I have here, they said, use lots of thought bubbles to show what King is thinking and not just saying. And include quotes of his famous sayings at the end of the book and connect them to moments in his childhood. And this last one says, just be sure to make it interesting.

Summer: All good advice.

Martin: That’s the advice that I got from a class of fifth graders. It was really helpful just hearing about what they look for in a book, and what would draw them to this. But I think just the fact that it’s going to be focused on [King] as a kid—we’re not going to leave that moment of his life, we’re going to keep him there; they found that extremely exciting. And so I’m working with an illustrator and thinking about what the pacing is going to be like—that is what I’m working on now.

Summer: Mechanically, how does that work between you and the illustrator? Are you writing separate from the illustrations? Are you sort of collaborating continuously? How does that work?

Martin: Collaboration. What moments in the book would be really, really powerful to depict in picture form, to illustrate? For example, having a moment where King is playing basketball. And as I mentioned in the book, at one point in time, he’s considered a ball hog. His friends dub him “Will Shoot” because every time he catches the ball, he will shoot. They complained about it. So that moment, having a picture of a young Martin from pictures that we have, trying to illustrate him shooting the ball, that would be a powerful moment to illustrate.

So talking with an illustrator about what moments in the book would be really powerful, but also where you could convey a good amount of information at the same time. It’s not just about basketball, but we could also use that to point out that he’s angry right now. He’s upset about what happened to his grandmother. So that type of collaboration about what moments are going to be really, really powerful to illustrate is what we’re discussing.

Summer: What’s the timeline on the book?

Martin: To be determined. When we can finish it, and making sure that it doesn’t come up too close upon Young King, the biography. So, to be determined.

You can find Lerone Martin and the Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute on Facebook and Instagram. And you can pick up Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. (Amistad, 2026) wherever you buy books.

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“I think I thought it was going to be more philosophical,” I said, barely out of our cursory introductions to one another. “But there was much more art and literary criticism, which I really enjoyed.”

We got into some of that criticism on the pod, and then we came over here to Substack because I wanted to pick Jason’s brain about his approach to criticism, given his academic background in history and folklore.

Sullivan Summer: I’m curious about the part of the research for your book that involved reading 20th century literature. Are you reading as an academic historian? A folklorist? A critic? I’m curious about what hat or hats you wear as you’re reading for your book.

Jason Young: I really appreciate that question. You’re asking me to make explicit something that may be more implicit in my practice, so I’m happy to do this. I really see the world as a text. I’m always reading texts, and they might be visual, they might be auditory, they might be textual. So if I go into a historical archive, like the dusty old brick archive that we might imagine, if I’m in that place and I’m reading some archival document of whatever type, I’m never taking it at face value.

This document has come to me through a whole network of power relationships, so that what I’m seeing on the page, it could be a diary entry, it could be a criminal case record, it could be a police record, whatever it is. Whatever I’m reading, I’m reading something that has come to and through me from layers of power by the time I get my eyes on it. So I’m always reading it with that in mind—that there are intentions and ambitions and ideas. Folk had their own plans for this document that have nothing to do with me in the book that I’m writing. They did not do this for me. They did it for their own sets of contradictory and compelling reasons, and preserved it for their own contradictory and compelling reasons.

I see fiction writing in much the same way—that I’m reading a text that has come to me to and through a whole range of power relationships that emerge, not only out of the mind of the author originally, but also the publishing house that’s publishing it, all of those things that the award granting institution that saw fit to see this as an important book and slap an award on it. There are all sorts of power relationships that are coming to and through the text. And I’m interested in teasing out what parts of that are compelling or interesting or notable to me. But I’m always seeing it through or as a kind of encoded document, whether it’s a piece of fiction or nonfiction or whatever. I’m thinking through all of that as encoded documents. And so what I’m trying to do is decode the material in front of me.

Summer: I’m curious in your decoding, where, I’ll use the word intent, where intent comes in. Here’s what I mean by that. Certainly in the archive, whomever has preserved that thing had something in their mind. That’s why they preserved it. We also understand that so much of at least formal archival preservation was done by people who had the power to do those kinds of things. When I think about novels, not all novels, but some novels, and the intent to persuade when writing a novel, and certainly the novels in your book, I would argue those were written with the intent to persuade about something. And so I’m curious about where that comes. When I think about something being saved in the archive, it was saved with an intent. Was that intent to persuade? I mean, maybe it was. Maybe it was, and I don’t think about it that way.

Young: Yeah. I think about it as two parallel tracks. On the one hand, I do take seriously the history and content, context, intent of the writer. I don’t ignore that stuff. I think that the person writing is the person writing. That’s one track that I follow. So an author’s biography is really important to me. I know that some literary critics don’t feel this way; that they feel that the text has to stand on its own. It has to be completely separated from the mind of the author in some way. Now, I may be exaggerating to make a point, but I know that some literary critics will disagree with what I’m saying when, for me as a historian, it is important to understand the context in which the writer is writing something about their biography, and the larger arc in which this book appears. So that’s important to me. That runs along one parallel track. And I have ways to decipher who this person is, where they were born, what they were after in writing this book. We have mechanisms for pursuing that.

But at the same time, the text is the text. And so in that sense, whatever is on the page is ripe and ready for my interpretation and my criticism. And in that train of thought, I’m not necessarily thinking about what the author intended to say. And I certainly don’t feel obliged or compelled for my understanding of the novel to align with what the author intended.

I do see these two parallel lines. So as I’m reading, I’m thinking, yes, about the content and context of the work, but also this work stands on its own. And so I’ve got to treat it as a standalone work. And this might mean that the author in their personal experiences might have really good feelings about Black people, but also write a deeply racist novel. But both of those things can happen.

Summer: When we were doing our other discussion [for the Additions to the Archive podcast], you introduced some very technical, scholarly terms for things. So I’m going to ask you a question with a technical scholarly term, which is, do you find yourself hate-reading when you do some of this? Like, is some of this a hate-read?

Young: Oh, wow. Oh my gosh, I have been thinking about this a lot. Here’s the thing and I don’t know why this is. I don’t know why this is, and I don’t have a graceful way of saying this, but I am absolutely astonished and compelled by white racial fantasy. And I am interested, I am deeply interested in white people. But when I say “white people,” I don’t mean white people as individuals walking around their lives. I am deeply interested in the ideology of whiteness and the people who perform it. It’s a fascinating thing to me as a subject of study. And so this means that I find myself, I don’t know, maybe it’s my answer to the question of hate-reading, but I find myself reading, for example, the arguments in favor of slavery or segregation. Just this semester I’m teaching a class and I have my students reading this explanation for the necessity of segregation. It was written in response to Brown v. Board of Education.1 The decision had come down and Herbert Ravenel Sass, one of the people who I talk about in the book, had written this full-throated defense of segregation. One of the things that he argues is that if white and black people end up going to school together, then they will never develop their natural tendencies to be separate and apart. And he saw this as a really bad thing. He makes the perfect case for desegregation. That the natural, what he calls, natural disinclinations of one person to the other, and that’s not the kind of society that he wants to imagine, a society in which Black and white people never develop their natural animosities; that we need those natural animosities in order to build the ideal society. And so he makes this full-throated defense of segregation and how Brown v. Board of Education is going to be the end of American society as we know it. And at one and the same time, it can be read as a cheerleading argument in favor of integration, but he positions it in exactly the opposite way. So there is something astonishing and compelling to me about whiteness as an ideology and the people who perform it.

But even though this is a book about white racial fantasy and the characters, like the main characters are all white folk, it is my best attempt at a love story for the Black people who are not named, and who experienced this in real life. It’s my best attempt—not to speak for them, I have no business doing that. But it is out of a deep and abiding love and affection. Not just like tribute or obligation, but like deep love that I wrote the book and that I wrote the book in the way that I did. It’s something that is actually not obvious in the book. I don’t think I say that out loud, but it is my best love letter to my grandmother and all the grandmothers who had to live in this bizarro world. Live in this world where they are represented in a way that is completely unacknowledged and divorced from the realities of their lives. It’s a wild experience.

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Sullivan Summer: What is the Black Men Read book club?

Raymond Williams: Black Men Read is a virtual book club. We have members all across the US and all across the world. The club has been around since about 2018; I got involved in the club in 2020. So, during the pandemic.

Williams: We meet every month of the year, January through December, and we read a book every month except December. December will usually be our “Year in Review” month, where we go over what we read and what we want to read in the future.

Summer: I’m going to assume that over the course of your life, you’ve been part of many book clubs. Is that a fair assessment or no?

Williams: This is the only one. Since I’ve been involved with this club, I’ve been in like three. But prior to 2020, never.

Summer: Okay. So why—how did you get involved in this club then? Like, why this book club?

Williams: Well, it’s a fascinating story, just how it happened. I was blogging by myself; blogging what I was reading. I read this book in 2020 called The Black Cabinet by Jill Watts, which is about the Black cabinet that supported Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal period of his presidency. And I was reading an early copy. I was posting about it on Twitter, when it was Twitter, and the author saw my post and whatnot. Apparently, she then told a Black female book club about me, because the Black female book club was doing a joint club meeting with Black Men Read about the book that I had just read. And so the club, the Black female club is called Mocha Girls Read, and they have multiple chapters across the US as well. They invited me specifically. They said, Hey Raymond would you like to join this joint discussion to talk about the book? We’d love to have, you know, hear your thoughts and feedback, that kind of thing. So, I went to that meeting in June, and then my first Black Men Read meeting was like August or September of 2020. After that, I got involved in terms of the leadership of the club, like the next year, in 2021.

Summer: I’m part of a literary society here in New York. So, essentially a book club as well. And, you know, I’ve been part of book clubs other times in my life that were really more about drinking wine than actually reading the book, which I feel like a lot of—at least women’s-centered book clubs tend to have that reputation. But there is something very different about certainly the literary society I belong to now. And from what I observe online, Black Men Read and Mocha Girls—I actually read one book with Mocha Girls several years ago and it was amazing. We read Assata [an autobiography by Assata Shakur].

Williams: Oh, yeah,

Summer: It was amazing to read with them. But you’re involved now. Like, you’re in it. Why stay in it? For somebody who’s reading this, who says, book clubs are not for me. Why do it? Why stay involved in it?

Williams: Right. I mean, the best answer is really the community. I’ve been in the club six, about to be seven years. The makeup of the club in terms of people who come to the meetings has changed. If you looked at that club in 2020—it’s like night and day in terms of people. Now we have a broad age demographic of, you know, folks in mid-late 20s to, I don’t like to say “old,” as seasoned as their mid to late 70s. It’s so fascinating to me to have people in those contexts. We’re reading the same book. You know, of course, we have all different life experiences. We’re from different parts of the US. And so to me, having the opportunity to see the same people once a month, many of whom I’ve never met in person, right? It’s just, you know, it’s kind of heartwarming. And we never have any major scuffles or arguments; people tend to genuinely care about each other. It’s a little antithetical to what you tend to think when you say, Oh, a group of Black men coming together to share. You know, you don’t think about the sharing emotions part, right? I mean, we’ve done that plenty of times. Sometimes we’ll talk about books on mental health or, you know, just more sentimental books where, like I said, many of us only talk to each other once a month, but they’re very comfortable in sharing their life stories and their life experiences to us every month.

Summer: Do you think there’s something about coming together around a book versus something else? Like, you could come together around a baseball game too, or a movie. Do you think there’s something different about coming together around a book?

Williams: Yeah. To use your example, a baseball game, right?

Summer: I don’t know, you may want to say football or basketball. You’re in [Maryland]. So maybe you want to say football. I’m a baseball girl.

Williams: With games, whatever sport you wanna focus on, there’s a lot of objective facts, right? I mean, obviously there’s objective facts in books as well, but it’s like there’s more things that are clear cut in a game, you know? Or, the more subjective piece of it is, okay, you can say—Oh, that was a bad play, that was a good play, right?

When you’re coming together and reading a book, it’s a little different. I mean, there’s some similarities obviously, because you can say, Okay, I don’t like how this story was told, or I like how this story was told, and there’s just differences in opinion from that. But the way I think about it in terms of those two instances, sports versus a book, you’re spending much more time reading a book than going to some sports game that may be a couple of hours. That people come every month—a lot of the guys in our group don’t read as much as a lot of the other gentlemen; they might just read one book a month and that’s it. So the fact that they’re spending their time on that, and then giving up an hour to an hour and a half to talk to us about it is, you know, it’s just very rewarding. As I said before, it can have some sentimental value.

Summer: I’m curious about whether there is something in a group of Black men getting together that wouldn’t necessarily happen in mixed company?

Williams: There two ways of thinking about this. We have done joint book club discussions before. I mentioned Mocha Girls Read, and we’ve done some other female book clubs in the past. But they’ve always been Black female book clubs, not anybody outside the Black community. But to your point about like, how do you talk about a book when you’re just in your group versus if it’s broadened out—there’s obviously, everybody knows it’s a safe space. So they do feel more empowered to be honest about, you know, why they liked this story or why they didn’t. And to your point, I feel that even if we had members outside the Black community, I don’t think people would temper their remarks. I think they would say the same thing that they would say to other people. Because we have this one member—he will have conversations with people that are not in the club, about the club. And he will say, Well, you know, I read this book in my club, you should read this because, you know, whatever reason. And then they talk about it about the significance, what it means to him and so forth.

Summer: What type of books do you all read?

Williams: Let me backtrack. When I joined in 2020, remember I said the club was totally different compared to now. That was the same for what we were reading. When I joined, it was pretty much nonfiction every month. Hard history, nonfiction, every month, which obviously was my go-to genre to start with anyway, so I wasn’t opposed to that. But I noticed being an admin, I think because the community aspect of having a conversation about it is different when you’re reading a book by yourself, and you’re reading all those books by yourself, and you’re not talking about it with anybody, but me and the other admins at the time were noticing we were literally just having the same conversations about different books. Sometimes we’re reading slavery books or civil rights books or Black Lives Matter-related books, but the same talking points were happening. And it was getting to a point where me and the other admin at the time were sick of it. We are tired of talking about the same stuff every month. So one of the things that we started doing, and I was floating this too, I said, why don’t we start reading fiction? Let’s just slowly dip our toes in fiction.

Williams: You don’t want to upset the folks who are super nonfiction, right? And so I said, we can make it an easy transition [by reading] historical fiction, because you know you are already in the history part. For example, now this is like four or five years ago, but one of the first books we read was that was fiction or historical fiction was The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.

Summer: Oh, yeah. Yep. Sure.

Williams: So we read that and they they enjoyed it, which was a good sign, right?

Summer: That is a tiny toe dip.

Williams: Right, exactly. So we did that. And then we started getting into fiction that is not historical fiction. We read some science fiction. We read Parable of the Sower [by Octavia Butler]. That’s how I read Parable.1 It was through the club. We primarily focus on new books, but we also read older books, In ‘24, we did poetry for one month, and we did two poetry collections. Some people liked one book, some people didn’t like the other, and I got an earful that poetry was not their thing. That’s fine. Completely understandable. I like poetry. So I keep reading it, you know, when I can. But so we’ve done that. We’ve done mystery novels. We did horror for the first time last year. So yeah, we’re branching out.

I mentioned we always do one book club, at least one book club meeting with Mocha Girls Read every year. Ever since I’ve been involved with Black Men Read, they have been pushing and prodding and trying to get us to read a romance novel with them. We were super resistant. And so I relented. I said, you know what, I am not opposed to reading it. It was just that there were some people that were like, super gung-ho “no.” But we had gotten to a point where I was like, well, we’re reading everything. Why not? Why not? So we ended up reading Reel by Kennedy Ryan. And surprisingly, everybody liked it, even the guys.

Summer: In the macro, you read all these things about how men don’t read fiction. I don’t understand what that’s about. I don’t get it. My partner is in a book club with his line brothers. It’s just them, and they are very adamant they only read nonfiction. He’s very open to recommendations as long as they’re nonfiction.

But at the same time as I’m saying that, you know, when you said “romance,” I made a face. I’m like, Nah, not for me. Of course there are really compelling books in every genre, and books that aren’t for you in every genre also. So I think it’s great to have this space where you can push out of your comfort zone. I actually think you and I had this conversation on Instagram, because I read an S.A. Cosby book.2

Williams: Uh-huh.

Summer: Which is not, I mean, that’s not romance, but that mass-market mystery type of thing is just not something I read. But I wanted a little break from the nonfiction slavery stuff. And I loved it. I loved it. It was so good. And I’m like, Oh, I should do more stuff that’s like outside of my box.

Williams: I love that. Right, yeah, yeah. And I’m glad you mentioned him. Because we’ve actually, I think we read three of his books. We’re slowly becoming, I shouldn’t say slowly becoming, we’re hardcore fans of his works now. We’ve gotten to a point where we’re trying to read everything that he’s written. We’re going to be reading one of his books in June.

There was one point I wanted to make to you about what you were saying: Why is it that the perception is men, or Black men, just read nonfiction all the time? There’s many points to kind of go there, but I think some of it is because there’s a perception that there’s a certain type of nonfiction book that they, that men, Black men gravitate to. Some of it is on the self-help side of things. That’s like, you know, productivity, self-help, how to get rich, business-oriented books, right? And then, you know, the history kind of thing, or maybe biographies. I don’t know if that fits in that mold or not, but it’s definitely, the productivity or self-help books are there.

But a lot of the men that I have connected with either through the club or on social media have like really demystified that as a thing. Cause they’re, you know, they’re reading all over. They’re reading all types of genres and so forth. But it always bothers me though. And I do see someone, you know, they’ll find some random guy on the street and they’ll say, Oh, what’s your favorite book? And they’ll say, my favorite book is 48 Laws of Power [by Robert Greene]. And I’m like, you’re feeding into that. You’re feeding into that same, you know, perception that is not prevalent among most Black men.

Summer: It’s good to hear that your actual experience is that people are reading broadly, really widely, because I think we need to.

Williams: Exactly, yeah.

Summer: You read a lot. You read more than one book a month. But for many people, one book a month, 12 books in a year is, you know, beyond what they have done before. Do you have any advice for people who would like to read more, but just can’t quite figure out how to make that happen?

Williams: I would always recommend, read shorter books, right? You know, if there’s something less than 200, less than 300 pages, go for that.

Williams: Prioritize books that you actually are interested in. That’s one of the rules of our club. We always get new members at the beginning of the year because, you know, New Year’s resolutions and so forth, but I always tell new members, we aren’t keeping a tally of how many of you all come. Or if you come to one meeting, then you don’t come to the next meeting, we don’t really care, because we know that some books are going to resonate with you more than others. And so if you don’t want to read a book that month, you don’t have to come to the meeting. Or you could just come to the meeting to hear what we have to say about it, and then decide if you want to read it later on. So, you know, you have that freedom to choose if you want to read with us or not.

Summer: I was well into adulthood before I gave myself permission to stop reading a book that I wasn’t into. I used to be like, if you start it, you have to finish it, right? I’m a no quitter. And the first time I ever stopped reading a book changed my life. Now, also, I only finish the books that I’m into and don’t torture myself with books that are just not for me.

Williams: I struggle with that. I have gotten to a good point where I will DNF a book when it needs to happen. Matter of fact, there was a book that we read for book club last year that I wanted to DNF. I didn’t want to read it at all, but because I’m one of the admins, I’m like, I got to read this book, right? And I was dreading it. I was, I hate to say this, but I was essentially hate-reading the book near the end of it. I got to the end of it, and I still hated it. And what was so crazy about it was when we had the meeting, more people liked it than I did, so I had to play this delicate balance of—Do I tell them how I really feel, or do I just, you know, just see how the conversation goes? And learn from the conversation because, you know, they’re picking up something that I didn’t resonate with? And maybe I can learn something from this book that I actually hated.

Summer: Yeah, that’s always a trick too, right? To try to find—is there something I can take from this book?

As this interview is being posted in April 2026, the Black Men Read Book Club is reading Decent People by Deshaun Charles Winslow. People interested in joining can do so through the Club’s Facebook, Goodreads, or through bookclubs.com. And you can find and follow Ray on Instagram.

Sullivan Summer: Much of the work that you do as a historian is in the antebellum and Civil War eras. I was speaking with another author recently,1 and he was saying there’s not enough Black historians doing the Civil War. There needs to be more. We need to create space, the collective “we,” for more. Talk about how you think about that, if you think about it.

Antwain K. Hunter: I thought about this a lot. I think that person’s spot on. And so for me, you know, I went to Penn State. I was in the Richards Civil War Era Center there. Tony Kaye was my advisor. I worked very closely with Bill Blair as well. Bill Blair directed the center. And so I cut my academic teeth in a Civil War era center. The conflict and all of the apparatus around it are always near and dear to my heart.

I think that we do need more Black folks working in the Civil War era. And I think also not being afraid to claim that because, I know sometimes folks say: Well, I do work on slavery, emancipation; or: I work on the antebellum period. A lot of us, our work is in that the Civil War era.

I think that sometimes when we talk about the Civil War or Civil War era, people think military history. So they want to know what 32^nd Illinois Infantry was doing on the second day at Chickamauga. That kind of stuff. There’s a space for it, and I’m glad that some people are doing that work, but that’s not the type of work that I’m doing. I’m interested in some of the social dynamics. The way that laws are structured in this era, in this build up to this conflict that looms so large on the way that we understand ourselves as a country.

I think the reason we need to think about expanding how we think about what the war is and who the Civil War is is because if we don’t, we cede ground to the folks who see the Civil War as this struggle between a bunch of brave dudes and like, that’s the whole thing; and that’s it. It’s just neat and tidy. And I’m like, No, you can’t tell that story. You cannot tell the story of the American Civil War without telling the story of the African American experience in it. You just can’t do it. It would look crazy to do it. Right?

Hunter: I think also I would push that to Reconstruction. There are people doing great work on Reconstruction. You can’t look at the Civil War without thinking about Reconstruction. But that whole run of things—we need more diverse voices in it. Because I think, it’s not that only Black folks ask questions about Black people, or do work on Black folks. My advisor was white. You know, I have [white] friends who are scholars who work on African American history. But I do think that the more diverse pool of scholars you have, the more diverse types of scholarship people are going to be doing because they’re resonating with questions that some people don’t think about, or understandings of the past that maybe other folks haven’t thought about because it’s not part of their family legacy, or not part of their family tradition.

I think that the more people we get, more Black folks doing it, thinking about like, more scholars of Mexican descent who might be asking questions about Mexico’s relationship to the Confederacy. They’re sharing a border right when those questions come up. Indigenous folks. Right? There’s some scholarship on Indigenous roles in the Civil War. There’s space for more. I think all of that, all of that.

You see a lot of those big chains where you start to get those trickling things coming in. It’s with the inclusion of more women and people of color in the profession generally. That came in an earlier generation. I think more of that is always good, because otherwise it’s like you get this view of the war that I think doesn’t really—I mean, I’m not knocking anybody’s work, but I think that it doesn’t give us a full picture. We kind of have this thing of like, Oh, yeah, it’s a bunch of brave dudes and they all fought and everybody was right in their own way. And then that’s the end of it, and we all move on. And everybody should be memorialized with statues on the county green. It just leads us to the space where we’re cutting out the black experience if we don’t actively push to include it. And not to, you know, I don’t want to get up on a soapbox, but we can see this right where there are debates about whether or not Black History should be an AP course, or whether or not the signage at some of the national historic sites that talk about slavery should be taken down because it’s divisive or what have you. Right? That kind of history? People are trying to erase it all the time. Like, you have to actively keep working to bring it about. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a very, very good question.

Hunter: I think that we’re in a moment of, maybe crisis is too strong a word. But actually, maybe it isn’t. I think that we’re kind of in this moment of crisis with higher education, and also just with the way that we engage with our history as a nation. One of the things I hope people do is to just think about what is the thing that we want. Think about history. What’s the thing that we want from this? Or, what’s the thing we want from scholars generally? Is it that we want a narrative that always gives us the warm and fuzzies about the nation and its past? Is that a thing that is helpful or useful to us? I would argue that it is not. I think that what we should strive for is a complete picture. And that’s always the case. It doesn’t mean that it’s always perfect, but it also doesn’t mean that it has to always all be terrible.

It’s one of the things I tried to do in my previous book on firearms. It’s a tough subject, right? There’s a lot of death and a lot of destruction, but it’s not as if that’s the only thing. There also are elements of family and community and those pieces. There are instances of interracial cooperation. It’s not just that the white state is oppressing Black people. Also, there are white folks who, for a variety of reasons, engage in trade with Black folks, who assign bonds for them when they’re in court cases. Our past is complicated, our relationships are complicated, our relationship with the state is complicated, and we should lean into those things. That’s not an inherently bad thing. And obviously, this is an audience of readers, people who are thinking and who are asking these questions and pushing the envelope and not just sort of taking things at face value.

Hunter: What do we want out of American history? I think for some folks, they just want to feel good. But that’s not what history’s job is. You can watch a movie for that. History is something different, right? Let’s try and get to a complete picture of the past. And let’s constantly, you know, push each other.

In my book, I’ll talk about other scholars, things that they didn’t do. And then in a couple of years, somebody’s going to write a book and they’re going to be like: That Hunter guy—he completely forgot this thing. Or he didn’t do this, or why didn’t he do this? Or, he didn’t ask this question. And I don’t shy away from that. I like that. That’s what we need, those conversations. I did the research, this is what I came out with. Somebody else might look at [another location], Arkansas, and be like: Oh, it’s a completely different ballgame. Somebody else might look at, you know, Virginia. Oh, there’s some things that are different. But to me, I’m like, all those types of projects—I look forward to those. I look forward to reading them.

I want to see what other people think about these sorts of things. We can’t be afraid to have discussions and to sometimes be like, Oh yeah, we dropped the ball on this point. Whether it be as an individual, as a person, as a state, as a nation, sometimes that happens. So let’s address it and let’s move forward. You don’t just sweep it under the rug. That doesn’t serve any purpose.

Hunter: And then just a last point about universities: we have to ask ourselves, what do we want from universities and scholars? There’s increasing scrutiny of scholars as if we’re all some sort of like, radical lunatics. We’re not. We’re trying to teach students our subject matter. We’re also teaching them how to be critical thinkers, teaching them how to be engaged with the world that they’re living in, with the past, in the nation that they’re living in, to be able to write, to put together an argument, be able to defend that argument with evidence, to find evidence, to understand it, to read through it and make sense of it, to critique scholars. Right?

I tell students all the time, you’re going to disagree with each other, you’re going to disagree with me, I’m going to disagree with you guys. And that’s okay. Like, we don’t have to agree on everything, but we find ways to make sense of the past and to learn how to craft an argument; teach them transferable job skills. That’s what we do here.

Hunter: We’re in this world where we’re demonizing experts in a variety of things. None of this is going be helpful in the long run. It’s true of the academic space. It’s true of like, medicine. I don’t go to the mechanic and offer my opinions on what you should do to my car. I’m not a mechanic. I don’t understand how cars work. I just bring it in and I let the professional handle it, right? I think that you can always ask questions, but I think that we have to come to a place where we figure out what is it that we want out of higher education. What is it that we want out of government. Out of our relationship with each other. There’s just so many things that feel like they’re in flux right now, and most of it does not feel particularly helpful.

Summer: I’m reflecting on this question: What do we want? What do we want from scholars? Is it warm and fuzzy? And for me, the term “status quo” jumped into my head. Like, this desire for preservation of the status quo. You can be additive to a point. But there’s a tipping point at which what you have just added is no longer okay, because now you’ve upset the apple cart. You’ve upset the status quo. That’s what it feels like.

Hunter: I think you’re absolutely right. And I think one of the things that’d be fascinating is like, think of any sort of marginalized group and center them. My position at North Carolina is, I’m the North American slavery person essentially. But over the course of my career, I’ve taught a host of courses, Civil War, Reconstruction, American Revolution, the early Republic, the US South, Slavery in the US Civil War. I did a bunch of grad courses and different things. But it’s one of those things where, I think that there are a bunch of different ways that we can think about this, and these marginalized folks are central in a lot of things.

What would happen if we just did a US survey class, this was just your general run of the mill US history, but if it was centered on women? And so you’re still talking American Revolution, but in every step, women are centered in it. Or Black folks are centered in every step, Indigenous folks in every step. I think the shift in perspective would be incredibly useful. And I don’t hear that and get nervous or afraid like, They’re taking away. . . ! No. It’s just a different perspective. And I think that would be, that could be interesting. It could teach us things that we didn’t know previously. Having those added perspectives is useful.

Whose voice should we privilege? Is it only the elites in government and business and finance? That would be crazy, right? What about poor white folks? Do they get a say in any of this? Do we think about their perspectives? Laboring class peoples from all different walks of life. People out in rural North Carolina. Do they get a say? All of those voices should be part of the conversation. It feels sometimes that there is this effort to preserve the status quo. It seems like we’re so afraid to just open the door to something different that we’re doing ourselves a disservice, and setting ourselves up to be people who can’t engage in a society and a world that just is what it is.

Hunter: It’s a diverse place. You can try and cut it all out. It’s not going to go away. You’re just setting yourself up to not be able to function as well as you should be able to. Or to get an education that is like, half done. Why do you want the half-baked version of American history, when you could have the full version? Like, what are we doing? What’s the message that we’re sending to our students about these things?

The thing that is most frustrating about a lot of this is that it seems as though in many walks or facets of our life, there are people making decisions on things who are probably not the people who need to be making decisions on those things. There are people who don’t understand healthcare who are like: I’ve got thoughts about healthcare. Cool, nobody cares, right? There are professionals in this, let them do it. There are people who have thoughts about how education should work, who don’t work in education, who have never worked in education. Just because you went to a college 40 years ago doesn’t mean that your opinions on how a college should run, or what it should look like, are valid.

There’s a lot of stuff that people don’t understand about how things function. And you could come learn about those things, or you could sit and sort of just write legislation, or push policy that isn’t serving those institutions in the long run. And what do I know? I’ve not been at it that long. This is my 12^th year or thereabouts of being faculty. I was at a different university before I came to Carolina. But it’s like, just let the people who do this for a living figure it out. You got concerns, raise the concerns. Let’s hear them, let’s have a conversation, let’s talk. Let’s have a dialogue about it.

Sullivan Summer: As I understand from reading Currencies of Cruelty that you taught a course in which you looked at the television show American Horror Story as it relates to your research into the performance archive.

Danielle Bainbridge: Yeah, so it’s a course I teach called “Performing the Freak in Pop Culture,” which is kind of a funny title, but it’s actually a course about performing difference on stage. What does it mean to perform race, gender, disability, sexuality, class? What does it mean to perform these things on stage from the 19th century to the contemporary? And one of the texts that I used to bring to that class was American Horror Story: Freak Show, because in my book, Currencies of Cruelty, I talk about Black people who were born into slavery and then made to perform in side shows and freak shows as a way of earning money for the estate. I became interested that season of the show in particular because when I first started teaching the class as a grad student, it had only come out like a couple of years before. Now it’s been many years since that season came out, but people still remember it and still have a sort of, you know, pop culture memory of it.

But what was really fascinating to me was when I would screen it for my students, they were familiar with the iconography of freak show, even though freak show largely went out of fashion in the mid 20^th century. These are students who were born after 2000. They would have never even attended a freak show or seen one, and yet they knew the carnival music and the circus barker and the red tent and the, you know, the markers of freak show and circus and sideshow, even though they’d never witnessed it.

I thought that was fascinating, especially because the other driving factor of my book is about enslavement. And similar to that, most of us have never witnessed or experienced enslavement. I mean, human trafficking still exists, so I want to acknowledge that. But we haven’t witnessed or experienced, you know, historical US chattel slavery in that way. And yet we all have these different cultural memories of how it worked, whether it’s through literature or film or plays or history classes.

I thought that parallel was really interesting to see how both of these systems of enfreakment—being made into a human freak show, and enslavement weren’t erased from cultural memory, but rather reabsorbed into American cultural memory in a way that most of us can’t even necessarily articulate, but is still really prevalent today.

Summer: I watched that season of American Horror Story, so when I read it in the book, I immediately knew what you were talking about. But I hadn’t thought about until you just said it—I learned about slavery in school. We’ll put aside the veracity of what we learned and the truthfulness of it. However, you learn about slavery in school but, to your point, I feel like I’ve always known what a freak show is and the types of performers in freak shows. I’ve never seen a freak show, but I knew about it long before I ever read any sort of academic text about freak shows. Where where would I have ever learned that?

Bainbridge: I mean, it’s fascinating. There are ways that a lot of the markers of freak show became kind of synonymous with Americana, you know, American entertainment. I don’t know if you grew up watching like Looney Tunes or cartoons, you would see these kind of caricatures in the cartoons that are meant to harken to that style of performance.

Summer: Like the strong man.

Bainbridge: Exactly, or the circus barker, the bearded lady. And you would see these images and these things recreated, but we didn’t necessarily know what they were about. I think that’s a kind of way these sort of cultural memories get embedded and normalized, even though we don’t necessarily know where they originated from.

Bainbridge: I can’t put my finger on the moment when I first heard the term “freak” or the term “freak show,” but it’s something that’s always been part of my memory, even though I myself have never gone to a live freak show. I’ve seen video and things like that, but I’ve never actually seen a live freak show performance.

Summer: I’m interested also in this idea of using a non-historical text or media to teach US history. Because American Horror Story, it’s not a documentary. It doesn’t pretend to be “true.” It’s not trying to tell a “true story.” It’s not even pretending to do that. But yet you use it as a way to talk about history.

Bainbridge: As a theatre historian and a cultural historian, I like to think about the ways that culture is representative of bigger questions. So when you see a certain movie or a certain TV show or a book become really popular, my first thought is, what’s driving that? What in our current moment in the atmosphere? What are we thinking about collectively that makes us all gravitate towards that novel or that TV show? What’s driving its popularity? I think oftentimes in these shows and these representations, you know, whether it’s play or whatever, they show a deeper understanding of what the cultural moment is, than even what historians do. Texts can be predictive in certain kinds of ways. They can think ahead in a certain kind of way. There’s a reason that The Handmaid’s Tale was a huge success when it came out and then became a huge success as a film and as a series years later, because there was a way that it spoke to its own cultural moment and then predicted a future moment. That sort of representation through art is always going to be interesting to me.

Summer: Is freak show predicting anything, do you think? Its continued popularity?

Bainbridge: I think in some ways it’s indicative of us still wrestling with questions around disability, and race, and gender. It’s all kind of, of a piece. I think the term has evolved in a lot of different ways. So in the class that I teach, Performing the Freak In Pop Culture, I also ask people to think about their own contemporary understandings of the word. What does it mean to them today? Sometimes it’s about, you know, sexual politics. What does it mean when you say a woman or a Black woman is a freak? Or what does it mean when you say a man is a freak? Or, you know, what does it mean when you say a person with a certain sort of physical treatment really is about being marked as deviant or outside of the norm. And so that’s why I think it continues to be interesting to me at least, and hopefully to the students who take the class, because it’s about deviating from the norm and how we negotiate that.

Additions to the Archive Podcast

Sullivan Summer: Your first book is about firearms, and now you are working on a project around alcohol usage? That’s an oversimplified question! But you just got finished with a book on guns and now you’re on alcohol.

Antwain K. Hunter: Yes. When I was going through a lot of the court records and some of the newspapers for the gun project, one of the things that struck me is that there were a lot of white folks dragged into court in North Carolina for selling alcohol to enslaved folks, which was against the law. There are mechanisms for enslaved people to get alcohol, but it’s not through the random guy at the county store, right? It sort of struck me that there’s a lot of this happening. What’s the story?

I started toying with this idea of doing a project on vice, and I was thinking it was going to be about alcohol and maybe, well, alcohol and gambling, maybe sex work, if I could find a way to work it in. I still at some point may tackle those other projects, but the alcohol piece kept sort of coming up. And so I was reading a couple of books that got me leaning more towards—there’s space for a project on Black people’s access and use of alcohol in a way that, similar to the guns, I think people had written about before, but it was always kind of on the margins, and it was mostly in plantation districts and not really in urban spaces. You get the couple of notes of, Yes, people are drinking and they’re buying alcohol.

Hunter: It was really interesting how this works and what the process is. Where are people getting it? Well, they’re getting it from the stores. But that can’t be the only place, right? Then like, who are the people who are selling it? And it started to grow a little bit. Also, I was reading a really good book that focused on delirium tremens, or this alcohol-induced mania that 19^th century Americans were kind of fascinated with. It was centered in Philadelphia and around white folks, but one of the things that struck me is that the medical profession is fascinated with this, and medical schools and medical students.

Charleston, South Carolina has a, there’s a medical college there. It started I think in the 1820s or something, right?1 It’s an old medical school. It also has hospitals that are treating Black folks and white folks, right? So I was like, Charleston’s the place for this. That’s going to be the location. And it’s not just going to be the sort of nuts and bolts of drinking. I really wanted to bring in this kind of like health component to it. One of the things that I’m trying to get at is that there are many complications associated with over-drinking. And it’s not specific to Black folks, of course. I mean, even looking at Charleston, proportionately, I’m still working through the numbers, but it seems as though there are more white folks who get in trouble legally for alcohol related issues, even though for a lot of the time that I’m looking at Charleston, it’s a majority Black city.

It’s interesting, right? I’m trying to get into the way that people are, their health or healthiness, is affected or impacted by the drinking. Charleston also has a huge temperance movement. There’s a large population of free people of color who have their church organizations and some social organizations. It seems to be a space where the conversation will be a fruitful one.

Summer: I’ve never lived in Charleston, but I’ve been many times. It’s a city that feels like it has vice in its bones a little, you know? My Charleston history, I’d say, is average at best. But drinking sort of feels like part of the fabric of the city in a way that you wouldn’t equate it with other places, necessarily.

Hunter: It’s funny you say that because it’s interesting to me—it always strikes me that like, Oh, well, it has this big temperance movement, right? And there are even folks there who were totally abstinent. Like, they’re not drinking anything, and no one else should. But also, it’s a city that if you look at the the police records, and there’s essentially a city council of sorts and a mayor too, but you look at these records, and they are constantly, constantly, constantly arresting people, locking them up, and fining them for alcohol infractions. And whether it’s people being like, drunk and riotous out in the street, to people who—there are constantly people just sort of like, passing out drunk in the market, on streets where there’s a lot of this drinking going on. And so you see the police report at the end of the week is like—there are a bunch of people who were arrested, and this many, they listened by race. And there’s a ton of folks both black and white, especially white folks who were dragged in.

Hunter: So despite the temperance movement, despite all of these mechanisms, and the public critiques that are in the newspapers about drinking, and despite all of that, Charleston is a city in this period where people are definitely having a good time with their alcohol consumption.

But there are also a lot of folks who end up in—there’s an almshouse hospital, which is essentially for poor folks, and also some of the other medical institutions. There are a bunch of people in there who are also dealing with alcohol related challenges. So it’s not just that they’re going out on a Friday night having a good time and that’s the end of it. There are people who seem to be—I’m still sort of digging through this—but who seem to be dealing with medical issues that are a result of all of this. And so that’s kind of the space that I’m trying to get it. You see this sort of anecdotally in the papers. You see the people who are in the hospitals, who were treated and then released as having been cured. But like, that’s the elements I’m trying to swim in. Like, how this impacts people’s bodily health and how the state’s responding to it—what they see as a crisis of over-drinking—how individuals are responding to it, how Black social organizations are responding to it, or if they’re responding to it, how the churches are responding to it. That’s the space that I’m trying to get into.

Summer: When we spoke on the New Books Network about your latest book, A Precarious Balance, which is set in North Carolina, you talked about beginning the book physically located elsewhere, and now you are in North Carolina as you were finishing it. Talk about how you think about this book that you’re working on now and the sense of place. Charleston’s not that far away from North Carolina, but you don’t live there. Talk about how you’re thinking about that.

Hunter: It’s a great question. I’ve been to Charleston twice on research trips. I’ve been to Columbia once. I was in Charleston two weeks ago for a couple of days. And I was just in, on Thursday and Friday of last week, I was in Greenville, at Furman University’s archives going through some materials.

It’s a little trickier; I’m feeling a little bit removed from it. But I’m closer to Charleston than I was to North Carolina when I started the North Carolina book. So being able to get down to Charleston pretty quickly is something I’ve appreciated. I haven’t missed the beauty in that I can go to Charleston and kind of walk around it a little bit.

Hunter: And, of course, it’s changed over time a bit, right? The medical school looks different. The hospital looks different. There are all these new buildings. It’s a very fine, modern city, right? But there are parts of Charleston that if you walk through, it doesn’t look, and maybe I’m just wrong, but it doesn’t look or feel that differently than I imagined it did in like 1840. Where a lot of the style of the architecture is there. The market’s in the same place. You have some of the roads or streets, King Street, Tradd Street, the Battery, that you recognize. I’m like, Oh yes, that’s what this is.

So it’s easy to kind of get a feel for what the city would have felt like, at least to some extent. And even just the distance between spaces, getting the feel for that. In some ways it is still a very walkable city. Reading through some of the records, you get a sense that the city is not sprawling and huge like a New York, and that is right. You’ll read about, there’ll be an enslaver who was like, Yeah, I was walking down Tradd Street, or whatever, it was King Street, whatever, and I saw one of the men that I enslaved and he was going into that bar, right? Not that I heard, I saw him myself just walking down the street. You could run into people.

There are these grocery stores, and or “dram shops” they call them, where Black folks are going in and drinking illegally. And sometimes someone reports, I went in chasing so-and-so and I came in and there were just like, four Black dudes at a table having drinks. There’s a kind space in Charleston. I think that part of it’s that the city is small enough to kind of be familiar. I think the way the houses are situated—they’re like back alleys or back rooms, and some of these grocery stores, people are just able to go in, duck out of the street for a moment, have a drink, hang out. And this is something that is completely illegal, but also part of the city’s culture as far as I can tell.

Check out Antwain’s latest book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865, and keep an eye out for the second part of our interview coming soon.

Sullivan Summer: How do you think about your interviewing practice vis-a-vis your writing practice? Do you think of these as two totally distinct activities?

Diamond Forde: The reason I accepted the interviews position in the first place is because right before, I think Dorothy Chan was the editor in charge at Honey Literary at the time, right before Dorothy reached out to me, one of the things that I was thinking about is, how do I sculpt myself as a literary citizen? How do I participate and give back to my literary community? Because I don’t want to live in isolation.

For me, from the very beginning, poetry was always about community. I was a deeply dorky kid who moved around a lot. And so poetry and creative writing for me was like the very first time that I found community both on and off the page; I was able to participate in a community that poured into me as much as I poured back in.

As I was coming out of my PhD program, which was, in and of itself, a very alienating space, one of the things that I was recognizing is that the reason I was able to survive that space was because of the community that I had already built outside of it. And I wanted to pour back into my community the way they had poured back into me.

So then Dorothy reaches out, she’s like—We’ve got these editor positions that opened up. Do you want one? And first I had to sit and be like—you are a very busy person, Diamond. I sat with it and I realized, I can use this. I can use this as one of those avenues back into community. So I chose the interviews position because it felt like one of those ways that I could very palpably give back by giving writers a platform to speak about their work, to celebrate their work, but also to say the things about their work that they couldn’t necessarily say off the stage. And the resources to do that were already in place. I didn’t have to build from scratch. I was literally participating in a community of writers who I already knew and loved and dug, who were doing really smart things. On this platform, they were BIPOC centered. This is BIPOC run, BIPOC centered. And I was like, let’s go.

A big part of my writing practice is community. Even when I am writing my own, individual poems, they’re still in conversation with other poets. I’m reading other poets. And the real trick behind it is that it keeps me reading. Which is a thing that I think would be really easy for me to make excuses not to do. I am a busy poet, busy person, busy professor. I have to read my students—I’m supposed to be reading grad school applications right now. And I’m also judging a contest.

Summer: It’s a lot. I’m also judging right now. It’s a lot of stuff. But let’s be real here—real real. Not all interviewers read the books.

Forde: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. I’ve noticed that as someone who’s done some of these interviews. I don’t like that. Because it’s constructed in passivity, and I don’t want to be a passive part of my community. I want to be an active part of my community. I want to see the writing, right? Deeply, intimately. I want to be changed by that. I think that’s probably the greatest gift—the more that I pour into this process of being the interviewer, of reading the book, the more that it pours back into me. I learned things about poems that I didn’t know was possible. Then I get to take this pure, raw excitement that I feel for this book, and I get to share that in conversation and community with another writer. And that is a gift. So I’m really confused by folks who are like, I read the back of the book.

Summer: I also read all the books. I feel the need to say that. I read all the books also. And on the one hand, I get that reading takes a lot of time. I know it’s the reason publicists send questions ahead of time. I never read what the publicists send, because I want to ask what I want to ask.

Forde: Also, why are you putting on something you don’t want to read?

Summer: Yeah, yeah.

Forde: Why are you putting on something that you yourself don’t want to read? That’s weird to me, right? And also, like, you don’t even know what you’re platforming at that point.

Summer: Yeah.

Forde: And so I am then suspicious of your practice as an interviewer if you’re not going to read the work that you’re platforming.

Summer: My platform for the New Books Network is Black authors writing Black, I say “small h,” history. It may be an academic history text, but it might be poetry, it could be historical fiction, satire, criticism, essays, whatever, as long as it sort of like kisses history. Maybe kisses history with tongue, I’ll say.

Forde: You know, I’m there for it.

Summer: But for me, it’s an act of protest. From your interviews, I also get a sense you are doing something bigger. I mean, platforming individual authors is important, don’t get me wrong. Very, very hard work went into the book. You know that. But I get the sense that you are doing something with your interviews.

Forde: You get to participate in canon-making, which is such a huge responsibility. But also a huge opportunity to participate in some of the larger constructions of whiteness; thinking about who gets the opportunity and the space to voice and who doesn’t. And how can I use my platform to create a space for those who are often left out of the larger conversation, especially of American poetics? How am I contributing to the reshaping of that canon? I think that the beautiful work of interviews and reviews is that we can be part of that shaping force of awareness in terms of, not only who we put on, but who can reach other audiences, or our audience can reach into these poets and their work. It is, I think, this kind of like, bridge of intimacy we create through conversation.

And it becomes the important part of the interview to create a conversation between you and the person that you are interviewing, but also who that conversation invites in. Because there have been times where I have found myself in the dialogue of other writers, and been reshaped through that process. I think that is a unique experience that you can carry into the book, but doesn’t always translate in the book in the same way.

I really do think there’s power in being able to just talk to one another. And the first step for me in doing that is making sure that I am open to listening to the book. Right? Am I listening to that book attentively and actively? And then, and maybe you can talk about your own process in creating questions, because your questions are always fantastic, I think the real big challenge for me translating this almost ecstatic experience of reading a book into questions; into like, this deception of order. Because interviews have to have some semblance of a narrative arc.

Summer: Sure. Yeah.

Forde: When I read a good book, it’s like everywhere and everything, all at once. And trying to craft that into questions is always such a challenge for me. Especially in books that I’ve read at two totally different times that resonate with one another.

Summer: Oh, yeah.

Forde: Right? But that’s also, like a really good community-building gift to literally see the threads of poetry connecting us all no matter how far we really are. I love that work and that feeling.

Summer: I feel like it takes a certain amount of audacity.

Forde: Ooooh, audacity feels good.

Summer: Right? Like when you say, “I get to impact the canon,” it’s, like, wildly audacious to me. And I mean that in the positive. I think, with some of the people that I have interviewed, I’ve reached out and thought there was no way this person was going to say “yes” to me. You know, people whose platform is much bigger than my own. When I have a bigger platform, I get that. I understand they’re going to say yes because my platform is bigger, but for people whose platform is bigger than my own, I think they’re not going to say yes. And then they say yes, and I feel a tremendous amount of pressure. I understand what it takes to create a book. I understand the amount of time and just deep thought. And while the amount of time it takes me to read it and craft questions is only a tiny fraction of the amount of time it took to create the thing, I still feel like the author is owed equal effort on my part.

Forde: Yes. It’s an investment.

Summer: I want them to know, I see you. Now, I hope I’m seeing them in a way they want to be seen. I think there’s nothing more exciting than seeing them in a way that they didn’t realize they wanted to be seen, or were seen until I told them. Because those are the connections that you’re talking about. When they’re like, I didn’t write that down, but yeah! That goes back to the audacity though, cause then I’m like, I can’t believe I just said that to this person about their book.

Forde: But the question is, where’s the audacity rooted? There’s a reason that white men are addicted to audacity. There’s a lot, I think, of power in it. But again, the biggest difference is, where is the audacity rooted? Is the audacity rooted in and of itself? That’s white men business.

I am audacious as hell about the work that I do. Because I put time into it, right? Just like the writer puts time in, I put time into it. I put time into the practice of reading a poem in the first place. I’ve got a doctoral degree to prove that. I worked for that; worked hard. Everything was an obstacle. Everything was trying to stop me, in the way, trying to do that. Sometimes even my own committee. So trying to have faith in the work that I do, and then the time that I put into the work that I do, and to know that if I commit myself to that work, that it will do something? It’s like an audacity built on faith.

Summer: Yes.

Forde: And I’m not necessarily interested in that faith to a higher power concept, although I do believe that the connections that we have with our own community, the connections that we have between us, that is, I think, a kind of something higher. It’s more than I can construct individually. So when I am taking the steps to read that work, to craft that question, it is an act of faith, I think. And the work that I can do, and the work that the writer has already done, and where we can take that next. Maybe interviewing is my church.

Summer: How do you find your next, great interview?

Forde: I’m always looking for more pitches. We do get some pitches, but for the most part, I’m having to reach out to the folks whose work is on my radar, which in and of itself could be its own sort of limitations, because then it’s like, well, how is your radar constructed? But also, that wellspring is a beautiful, ever-filling wellspring, because there are so many writers out here doing absolutely phenomenal, mind-blowing work. So many folks that I could talk to, want to talk to, who I also just don’t even have the time for, because Honey Literary comes out like twice a year. That means roughly three interviews each issue, so that everybody can have their own equal space without having a kind of dominance of too many voices, because we also have to celebrate the other sections.

I think that’s also part of the beauty of being a part of a larger project, is like, Valentine’s is doing this one thing, and then the animals editor is doing this one thing, and then somehow, some way, we still end up speaking to one another. That’s another way, one of those ways that the community process really kind of shapes up. But again, a part of this work is being aware of my own limitations, and trying to grow beyond that. So yeah, slide into that Submittable. Introduce me to new voices.

Purchase The Book of Alice

Princess Joy L. Perry: Aging is such a strange thing, because I think at some point we just think of ourselves as, I’m a grown up. And the numbers just kind of keep accumulating and being applied to us. But to me, it does seem a very strange thing to say, I’m a debut novelist over 50. Because I remember what 50 was in my head when I was younger; when I was a kid. And it’s like, Oh, that applies to me now. It’s just strange.

Sullivan Summer: It’s so funny that you say that because I said to someone the other day, “I’m only one of two people in this particular group that’s under 50.” Okay, I’m going to be 49 this year. Like, it’s some kind of thing. Half my friends are over 50 because, you know, that’s the age that we are. So yeah, the 50s is this arbitrary line that suddenly is much closer than it used to be.

We’re a country that values youth. The way that careers go is that, you know, you are learning and practicing when you’re young, and by the time you’re 50, you’re established. You’re not supposed to debut at 50. Talk about how you think about that title for yourself.

Perry: It’s almost like standing at a distance, watching that term be applied to someone else. Because, like I said, I think I just reached a point where I began to think of myself as a “grown up.” Now, of course, some days I don’t feel like a grown up, but it’s like, Oh, I am, I am a grown up. I am the responsible one, you know? And so, I don’t know, I just think about when my mother was 50 and when my grandmother was 50, how it seems like this thing, this thing outside of yourself that you were going to reach. And then at 50, you would be grown and you would have all the answers and you would be your full, complete self. And none of that is true. None of that is true. And to debut at 50, I think there’s this idea that you should debut in your 20s or you should debut in your 30s or something like that. And maybe it would have been. I’m sure when I was in my 20s and when I was in my 30s, I, of course, wanted that to happen. But now I am grateful that it didn’t happen then, because I think most things that I was writing then would make me cringe if I had to go find them online and read them now. And also, there were things that I needed to learn, there were experiences that I needed to have. When I was 29, I left for the Peace Corps. So I got my graduate degree and then I went to the Peace Corps, and that taught me so much about myself. And I think that it also gave me the courage to persist in writing.

I obviously can’t speak for everyone and there are, I’m sure, wonderful novelists, accomplished novelists in their 20s and their 30s and whatever. I just could not be one of them.

I think also a story takes maybe just as long as it takes. There are things that I needed to do, things that I needed to see, experiences, losses. I needed to change. I needed to grow up. So at 25 and 30 years old, I was on my way to maturing, but I wasn’t mature enough to write This Here Is Love.

That label, “debut author at 50,” there was also something really exciting about knowing that I have a group of people out there who are my age, who didn’t give up. Because so much in our society tells us that if you haven’t done it by 25, 30, 35, just forget about it. And that’s what I would say. If you feel like you have a book or a story, maybe you just needed all those life experiences so that you could be better able to write this story. So there are a bunch of us out there. You know, we’re not the ones that are, you know, I guess celebrated in the way of, you know, “25 under 25” or whatever, we’re not those people. And that’s okay, because our stories require something else.

I also think that my idea of what it meant to be, what it means to be a writer at 25, 30, is very different than what my idea of what it is to be a writer is now at 54. I know writing now is not about me and it’s not about that thing that we see, the writing life, as something glamorous or something like that idea that you have when you’re 25 years old—when I was 25, 26 years old—smart, glamorous people discussing their books and doing on stage, doing readings and the acclaim and things like that. Ninety percent of writing is work. You’re by yourself and you are working and you are trying to figure it out. And that’s what it means to be a writer; that you sit in the chair or stand at your desk if you were so fortunate as to have a standing desk, and you do the work. And it’s not about me, Princess Perry. It’s about the story that came through Princess Perry. That’s what it’s about now. And at 25, I was probably way too immature to understand that—that the story is paramount and that the writer is, as Mary Oliver said, the writer is the vehicle, the story is the thing. The story is the thing that has to be in the world and we are very privileged to be the instrument of the story.

Summer: I wrote down, It’s not about me, it’s about the story. Is that what kept you going, do you think?

Perry: Yes, because, well, at least in part, I think there comes a time when I had so much time and effort invested in the book that I needed to see what would happen. I just needed to finish it and win, lose, or draw, I needed to be able to look myself in the mirror and say, you finished it. You stuck with it. Okay? But also, I feel that if I didn’t tell this story, who’s gonna tell it? This story came to me. And if I abandoned it, then it wouldn’t be in the world. So I have little sticky notes everywhere and I found some, I’ll show you. I have little sticky notes from my old notebook. Little things that I wrote to myself. This one says, “An imperfect story in the world is better than no story in the world.” And I wrote it on Thursday, June 18, 2018. That’s the kind of thing I had to tell myself. Like, you’re not gonna get it perfect, but having an imperfect story out in the world is better than not doing it at all.

Summer: I want to share with you an experience that I had because I want to ask your thoughts on it. Just a few years ago I started working on the novel that I have always had in me, and in my mid-late 40s I was fortunate enough to meet some other writers of my same age, doing the same thing. We had this conversation about people that we met at writing workshops and those kinds of things who are in their 20s, and a differing of approaches between the generations that my friends and I chalked up the fact that, in middle age, we have a different sense of urgency. We agreed that the story is going to come when it comes. Like, you can’t muscle it out. But, that said, our commitment to getting it out, and revising, and getting out—that was very, very different than our younger counterparts. And it is not about skill, it’s not about quality, it’s about none of those things, but simply about that we felt like we had a different sense of urgency.

Perry: Yes. Yeah, I agree with that. There are fewer, I mean, mathematically, there are fewer years ahead of me than there are behind me. But also, now that I feel like I have my footing as far as knowing who I am as a writer. I think part of the urgency that drove me was, okay, I want to finish this one so that I can do the next one, because here’s this other thing that I’m really interested in. And, like I said, I have less time, probably less time ahead of me than I have behind me, so I need to get on this thing, I need to get this ball rolling. And the other thing that maybe is a little bit freeing, you didn’t ask me this, but I’m thinking about this too, is because I’m a grown up now, because I have a full-time job, and because I have my own house or whatever, I could also say if the writing doesn’t, if nobody wants this book—which is really what I told myself—if nobody wants this book, I’m still gonna be okay. So there is no reason not to just go for it. So in a sense, that was a comfort, also because it’s like I have a place to stand. That was always very important to me to know that I could take care of myself and be independent. I have a place to stand now. And if nothing good happens with this book, I’ll still be okay. So I can do this, I can do this, I have enough stability in my life now that I can do this. And that helped me somehow.

Summer: Can you share what’s next?

Perry: I can tell you that I’m working on something. I don’t want to talk about what it is yet because it may change along the way. But I’m excited to be working on something new, and I am hoping that it won’t take me 10 years to do it this time. Yeah, I’m just excited to be investigating new things and seeking out the answers to new questions.

This constant collision of the South and our memory of its past is at the heart of the book Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) by Robert D. Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. Professor Bland and I talked about his book on a recent episode of the New Books Network, and then came here to talk about another of his intersectional endeavors near and dear to my heart—the practice of literary criticism.

Sullivan Summer: One of the things I noticed when I was looking at your CV is that you do a fair number of book reviews. What draws you to book reviews? And I’m also curious what you get out of a book review as the reviewer.

Robert D. Bland: There’s two levels to answer that. One—this is the bread and butter of academic service, right? A big chunk of a journal is book reviews. And they are thankless; they’re unpaid. But people pour a lot of time and energy into their books. It helps people to kind of situate. Someone wrote a book. What did the book accomplish? What did it not accomplish? Who is it speaking to?

At the broader level, I think writing a book is a really cool thing. If I were to describe my people, it’s people who read books. Academic books can be narrow and dry, but the best academic writing, I think, engages us in the way that the best creative nonfiction and the best fiction writing engages us—asking us to think broadly about the world, about ourselves and history.

I think history is a deeply humanistic enterprise. It asks us questions about what it means to be human beings. And so people who are doing that, taking those questions seriously, it’s like, you want to give them a good faith read, right? You want to help that book circulate in the academic world. You want to help see what people are seeing.

Sometimes people don’t accomplish that. I mean, I try not to write mean-spirited and negative book reviews, but sometimes you have to be critical as well. Criticism can help us grow and think about the world too, right? I want to read books that make me want to encourage and recommend books to people. Yeah, I take seriously the practice of reviewing people’s books.

Summer: So much of what you’re saying resonates with me. My criticism practice is in interviewing people, so it’s a little bit of a different kind of format. I’m not reviewing the book per se, I just get to ask questions, and ask about anything I want to know about. But I’m curious about the act of reviewing an academic book, knowing that the book—unlike, say, a novel or a memoir—that book has been through expert readers. Experts, ostensibly, have read this thing multiple times before it even gets published. Talk about how you think about approaching that from a reviewer’s standpoint.

Bland: There are registers, right? I’m just finishing teaching a graduate seminar that is like our introduction to historiography at the University of Tennessee. It’s one of these book-a-week graduate seminars, and people are reading books as kind of professionals, right? There’s the level of—is this historically accurate? Is this well-written? But there’s also—can you see the person in the book? Obviously some of that can be lost in peer review. And there’s a way that I think heavy-handed editors can take some of the life out of the book.

I think people who’ve discovered a project that lights them up—they discover the book that only they can write, and not everyone does that, but if you do, that shines. That emerges. Part of what you want to do as a reviewer is kind of—in what ways does this engage with historiography? In what ways is this making an intervention? But I want to always keep an eye on—in what way is this someone’s everything? I think about the kind of music artists make in their first album. And you spend your whole life writing that first album.

In what way does this not only answer a big historical question, but also a big humanistic question? What does it mean to be alive at that moment in the past? We were talking about Reconstruction [in our New Books Network conversation]. In what ways does thinking about Reconstruction help us understand that our democracy is on fire right now?

Bland: I’m thinking about just recently, Gabriel Winant’s book, The Next Shift, which is writing about the fall of the steel working class and the rise of kind of white and pink collar healthcare work that isn’t unionized and isn’t low paid. That book is really wrestling with these steel workers who gave their whole lives working in these mills and are broken down and really beaten down. On the one hand, they are the kind of high watermark of the blue collar elite, have good jobs, good pensions, can make a good living, but are at the end of their lives, living hard lives, and the people who are taking care of them often are their wives or their children or the kind of Black people who only got a toehold in that working class where they are last hired and first fired.

What does that tell us about America during the industrialization? You have broad language to think about something like the opioid crisis and a lot of good works that think about the rise of Trumpism and forgotten America, but a good work of history that also asks us to think about: What does it mean that you spent your whole life working in a place that is really hard on your body and now you’re kind of the last generation that is gonna do that work? But you have a good pension that allows you good healthcare? But that’s, like, the whole healthcare industry, which is kind of the foundation of this place?

I’m rambling now but, again, all those disparate parts can come together in a book that tells a good story which is, I think, what a book does, right? I think historians have the narrative. History is beginning, middle, and end. The book has a beginning, middle, and end, right? That’s the thing that draws me to reading and thinking about books deeply.

Summer: You don’t earn a PhD without having read a lot of books, but I’m curious what reviewing books has taught you about being a reader?

Bland: That’s a good question. In some ways, it speeds you up and slows you down. You have a limited amount of time to turn around an academic book review. You generally get six weeks. Obviously, concessions can be made, but that requires you to gut the book, so to speak, where you read for a main argument, and you have to pull out the important parts. That is not the way that books are meant to be read. But graduate students when they’re studying for comprehensive exams can’t possibly read every book on their comps list word for word closely. Yet if you want to pull out really important stuff it requires you to develop a practice that, at the same time that you’re pulling out the important parts, you’re rereading certain aspects, and you’re trying to kind of suss out: What was the first chapter that this person wrote? When did the book come together? How does this book actually work as an act of engineering? Can you see the seams? Or, to what extent is this something that—you can tell when this is something that is, Okay, I just need a book for tenure. This will get me tenure. What is this thing? Are you laboring with it too long? You’ve kind of lost sight of which way is up. How do you read slowly and kind of zoom in? And also, how do you zoom out and see: Okay, what’s the intervention? What’s the broader project here?

Summer: It’s interesting to talk about reading slowly versus reading fast. One of the things that has surprised me in my own criticism practice is I feel like, no matter how I want to read a book, fast or slow, the book will tell me how fast or slow it wants to be read. And sometimes I’m surprised. Sometimes I’ll sit down with the book and I think, Oh, this can be a quick read, and it’s not. Or vice versa. I think, Okay, this is going to be slow, and it’s such a fast read.

Bland: Oh, yeah. There are writers who make dense theory accessible. There are writers who make a straightforward story. That’s part of the process. But I think there is knowing your audience, right? Sometimes you read a book and it’s like, Oh, this is just outside of my audience. But in what way is this person concerned about people who are not in the middle concentric circle? In what ways is this book usable or legible to broader audiences? That’s something. Every editor, everyone at an academic press is so beyond your media audience. Everyone wants to say, It’s also for these people, and these people, and these people, and maybe it’s not. But that is part of what you’re trying to suss out.

Summer: I think a lot about the question of who a book is for. Like, who is the author writing for, and also who they are writing to.

Bland: Yeah. I think a lot about—I think you might think about this too—being Black and writing Civil War era history. Ta-Nehisi Coates has this essay in The Atlantic like, why don’t more Black people study the Civil War? It’s something that circulates in Civil War era communities. I’m an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Civil War Era, and I edit the blog, Muster. There’s like a thing, right? Everyone’s kind of aware of it. And as I’m writing my book, I’m very aware that I’m trying to bring together two worlds that don’t really intersect. It’s the world of Civil War era history that is, I mean, we’re long past the obsession over uniforms and bullet gauges. Obviously that stuff is still part of the history, but there’s a generation that I’m trained by—we’re writing about Emancipation. But that even that world—when I think about African American history, trends in African American history, African American intellectual history, like the disciples of Robin D.G. Kelly, broadly, the kind of people who are doing the stuff that makes Black people want to go to graduate school and study history—that’s not always the Civil War era historians who are doing it. I struggle with that. It’s one of the struggles that’s in my book. How do you bring in the people who are really interested in Black social and cultural life and are thinking about politics, thinking about Black social movements, the Black freedom struggle? All that’s there in the Civil War era.

Building those types of graduate programs that train those people; building the kind of places to write online and incubate those voices. There are people like Thavolia Glymph doing that work. Justine Hill Edwards is doing really impressive and awe-inspiring work. I mean, that history goes to John Blassingame and Armstead Robinson, among others, right? Hilary Green. I mean, they’re there.

All these journals—we’re trying to make calls where we’re trying to make these places more diverse and more inclusive. And also, history is under attack. African American history is under attack. It’s adjacent to the kind of thing where like, you talk to Black undergraduate students and no one enjoys watching movies about slavery. The history of slavery is—I mean, Jessica Johnson is a mentor of mine and Wicked Flesh is like one of my favorite books of the past decade. And also, to sit with slavery and the archive and that kind of death making for at least a decade or two is a big ask, right?

And graduate school is not always a place that’s ideal for Black social life. Then the academic job market is what it is when you’ve got to be willing to go wherever. But we need folks who are thinking about Emancipation. We need people who are thinking deeply about Reconstruction, thinking about, I mean, I’m thinking about Kidada Williams and her kind of work. And that is hard history to write and think about, but it’s also the work we need now more than ever.

Summer: If you could have written a review of any book, it doesn’t matter how old it is, what book would that have been or be?

Bland: Experiencing David Blight’s Race and Reunion at the moment of its release. I would have liked to have been a professional historian reading that book for the first time. I think I was in high school. I encountered that book in undergrad and, later, like really read it in graduate school. It’s a book I enjoy reading and rereading. You can see the fingerprints of that book all over my book.

Yeah, the thing where it’s like a big, earth-shattering book at the moment that it’s released. That’s always an interesting moment.

Marcia Chatelaine’s Franchise. There’s a deeply personal aspect. My dad is a fast food franchisee. And I see like a lot of family history there. There’s a version of writing a review of that book that requires me to think about the world I grew up in, my father’s world, that would be my version of, like, Dreams from My Father. I have to think deeply about the personal and the historical at the same time. I don’t know if I could do that, but the idea of doing that is something that would be—I think it would be meaningful.

Sullivan Summer: It is not often I get to say that I have with me an Emmy award-winning writer. Where did the Emmy come from? And what project is it attached to?

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall: Well, I’m geeky. I teach constitutional law, and I didn’t see people really thinking about the Constitution and realizing how important it is. The framers of this nation in 1787 thought that our U.S. Constitution would be what would bind us—not language, not money, not anything else. Because you think about, what is an American? There could be 50 people coming up with 51 different ways in which we would describe ourselves as “Americans.” But the framers thought that the Constitution would bind us.

I realized that most people talk about having rights, but they’ve never read the Constitution. And so Your Democracy is an animated series on the Constitution that’s produced by WHYY, which is a PBS NPR affiliate in Philadelphia. I won an Emmy as the writer of that animated series. It’s 10 episodes, that are anywhere between four to seven minutes, on different aspects of the Constitution.

I’m very excited about the fact that I won an Emmy. It’s a regional Emmy, but it’s still an Emmy. There aren’t that many professors who have an Emmy, especially a professor of constitutional law. And so I’m proud of WHYY and proud to be a part of that Emmy award-winning animated series.

Summer: You’re also a playwright. How do you think about your role as a legal scholar and educator who is also using other creative outlets to educate? Talk about how you think about these endeavors working together.

Browne-Marshall: I see myself as a playwright first. I began as a playwright. I was a little kid putting on plays in the yard. And I was a producer too, because I used to sell popcorn and candy and tickets to the plays.

I want to have a creative way to do my communication. There are things that I want to intellectually communicate, and I see the world as a playwright. I see the world as: sit and dialogue. When I view the world, just like someone might be a doctor and see the world as, you know, the physical body, I see the world in a way in which it’s very clearly people who are described as characters.

I know that other people see the world in different ways. As an activist, I wanted to convey the seriousness of issues and figure out ways to get people charged up, and want to be a part of changing the world. But as an educator is where I really found my stride because you’re standing in front of a classroom, and the students may not want to know about what you are trying to teach. You have to figure out ways creatively to get your point across.

A writer is something I’ve wanted to be and do since I was a little kid. Not only was I putting on the plays, I was writing the plays that I was putting on. And because I was bused across town, that advocacy, the activism part was triggered in me as well. I had all these things happening inside of me at the same time. I was just under the impression given by the world that you can only do one thing and, you know, you better get a real job.

Summer: I was actually going to ask you that exact question, because I was having a conversation with someone just a couple of days ago, a middle-aged person in corporate finance who said, “I think if I had had different encouragement from the world, I might have done something creative.”

Browne-Marshall: I have a short piece in my book that speaks to the times in which, as a writer, the world discouraged me. You know, I was discouraged. I don’t talk about this one, but I was discouraged by my English teacher in high school. I’d written this short story when I was in the eighth grade that won an award. So I thought, Oh wow. I used to have this giant typewriter with stuck keys that I would try to write. I wanted to have a little newsletter for the community so we could put things in it. I mean, I was always into writing. It was never encouraged. It was always discouraged.

At one point, when I was getting ready to go to graduate school, and I tell the story in my book, how I didn’t know what I should do. So I applied to law schools, I applied to business schools, and I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for graduate school. So I thought, if I got into the Iowa Law School, then I can also be there for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I had the stack of applications. And you know, back then, that was before the internet. I gave them to the postman, and no one ever heard from me because the postman must have thrown away all my applications—if you can imagine how devastating that is. And it just so happened that I had one law school application that I had submitted weeks after that group of about 12 applications that he had thrown away. So I ended up attending that law school and thinking that the world has conspired against me to keep me from being a writer.

But I was always writing on the side. I was always writing plays and essays, but then I lost the sense of self to make me want to submit them. So I had a drawer that was filled with these things I was writing. And it took a lot of time for me to get my heart back around writing. I began writing plays. I was having plays produced in New York and plays produced in Philadelphia. I was having plays produced on a steady, regular basis. I was working with a particular director, David Shepard, who’s passed away now. No one knew in law that I was a playwright. I would do these things during the night in theater and during the day in law. Most theater people didn’t get up before noon anyway, so they never knew what I was doing. I had this dual life. And it took me a while before I had to just say, I am a playwright.

I had a mentor, Jocelyn Clopton Cooper, who’s passed on. And she said, whenever you have a bio, you put in “playwright” because that’s part of who you are. That’s why when people read my bio and they say, “Playwright? What is that?” It’s like, yes, that’s what I am.

I’ve got two plays right now I’ve been working on that I look forward to seeing produced.

Summer: Can you talk about them? Or would you rather not? Everyone’s a little bit different as far as forthcoming work.

Browne-Marshall: I’m working on two plays and a novel. I have a short story in the Marvel universe. I’m very proud that last January, my short story came out as part of an anthology for Marvel.

And my two plays—one I’ll talk more about—but one of them is focused on white rage and Black ambition. And the question is, Who owns the American dream? Who owns American history? When we start thinking about American history and the erasure of Black history, the erasure of Indigenous history, and other things that anybody white feels uncomfortable knowing that’s true, then it’s like, What kind of world are you creating? You’re creating a world of your imagination; of myth.

So one of my plays is about that. It’s a two-character play. And it really is one of my best, I would say. I had a reading for it at Harvard when I was a Fellow there at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2022. It was the first time they had a Fellow who had a creative aspect to their theme. Each Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School has a theme, and mine dealt with public policy and creativity, because I want activists and artists to see more alignment, but I also want policymakers and others to be more creative.

That’s one of the things I’m just about. We can add this creativity. I don’t know how we ended up in these silos like we have that, you know, we’re not allowed to be creative. We’re only supposed to follow one route.

I had a play, Dreams of Emmett Till, that I created during the pandemic, turned into a film with director Bobby Field, and it won the American Film Award. I just came back probably three weeks ago from Cannes, France, and my documentary film, Before 1619 She Took Justice about Queen Nzinga and my travels to Angola actually won the jury award at the Pan-African Film Festival.

So I try to express what’s inside of me and decide what kind of platform is best for it. Is it an essay? An article? Is it a book? Is it a play? Is it a film? How do I express it? Is it a speech?

I created a class: Literature, Race, and Law at John Jay [College]. One way in which I could look at how law figures into fiction and nonfiction, for example, If Beale Street Could Talk, and the ways in which law figures into these things.

I really would love to be known as somebody who elevated law to literature. I know there’s law in literature and they look at a legal case by, say, Justice Hand, and say, “this looks just like literature and it reads like literature.” But I want law to be elevated to the point of literature so that those stories of drama that we have can be stories that are told in a way in which the conflict of law is seen in the arc of storytelling. So that’s something I’ve been working on.

Summer: Do you have any advice for people who may have non-creative, nine-to-five jobs, but have that gnawing inside them that they really want to do so many of the things that you’re talking about, whether it’s theater or fiction or creative nonfiction or poetry or what have you? Do you have any advice for how they can juggle those things? Maybe juggle is not the right word. Hold them all together?

Browne-Marshall: I was one of those people with the nine-to-five job, and I had the creativity inside of me, but I thought I could only do this job. You know? And that other lawyers would not respect me if they knew I was doing theater or had ideas of doing theater.

I’ve had poems published. You think about, Oh, that reveals a side of you that’s a vulnerability. You don’t want everybody to know your business. But I think the gnawing need to express oneself creatively is worth actually, you know, letting loose. And that you can do that on the weekends. You can do it when you come home. I find something that I like doing when I think of a title, when I think of a theme or think of something I want to write, just put it in my phone. The memo pad in the phone is a great place to put those creative ideas.

Take a writing class. That’s one of the things. I took classes at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver online, and the teachers and instructors were really great. And then I became an instructor myself, which was such a point of pride. But I just thought it was necessary for my peace of mind.

I’ll give you this quick story of a person whose uncle was a doctor. And he was always so mean and grouchy. When the family got together, he would go into another room and just sit and read a book. One day, his little nephew came in and was like, “Why are you so mean to everybody, Uncle?” And that’s the one time he told someone that he just wanted to play the trumpet. So when he retired from being a doctor, high esteem and everything, and had all these certificates on the wall, inside, he was not happy because he wanted to play the trumpet.

I think you don’t have to give up medicine and just spend your life playing the trumpet, but you can play the trumpet if you want to at family events. What are you going to risk, your ego?

I think that happens very often. That by the time you’ve established a life in which you’re seen a certain way, you don’t want to put your ego and that reputation at risk. You don’t want people to think that you’re really a comedian and then you’re going to test your chops out and get booed or laughed at or, you know, fail miserably.

But I think it’s worth the attempt not to have it gnawing inside of yourself that you didn’t give light to that voice inside that wanted to be heard. I mean, even if you do it on an amateur level, it’s still something that allows you to say: I am fully myself and not just the part of myself that, you know, I think people want to respect.

I kept saying for years, I want to be a writer. And a friend of mine said after my fifth book, But you are a writer. You’re the only one who doesn’t believe it. So yes, it took time for me, but I would say to anybody to follow your dream. And you don’t have to do it full-time.

I want people to be activists. And I believe they could be weekend warriors. You don’t have to be a full-time activist. You don’t have to give up everything. I mean, these people in my book, A Protest History of the United States, are regular people who kept their regular jobs and still did activism.

I think that’s important too, for us to realize that there’s a percentage of our time, tithe our time, money, and energy for social justice.

Summer: Such fantastic advice. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

Browne-Marshall: Thank you. I really appreciate this opportunity.

Purchase "A Protest History"

In this conversation we referenced:

Artist Ayana V. Jackson and her Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moments series

Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016); cover “Wild is the Wind” by Ayana V. Jackson

Victoria Woodcock, “New games with Old Masters,” Financial Times (December 12, 2023)

Northwestern University Black Politics - History - Theory Workshop

Political theorist and professor of social sciences, Dr. Juliet Hooker

Professor of Black studies, political science, and sociology, Dr. Barnor Hesse

South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press)

Shatema Threadcraft, “North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and Black Femicide,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press, July 1, 2017)

Dolores Hayden, “What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work,” Signs, Vol. 5, No. 3, Supplement. Women and the American City (Spring, 1980).

Urban planner, Eva Kail

Journalist, activists, and urban theorist, Jane Jacobs

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso Books, 1990). Excerpts from this book, including the chapter, “Fortress L.A.,” are available from various sources online.

Disabled designer and design researcher, Aimi Hamraie

Lisa Beard, “June Jordan’s Political Theory of Redesign,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 119, Issue 3 (August 2025).

Dr. Bonnie Honig, Professor of modern culture, media and political science

Professor of political science, Dr. Deva Woodley

Purchase The Labors of Resurrection

Here, we discuss:

Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue

The Treaty of Paris (1783)

Artist Don Troiani

Graphic Designer Bill Oates

San Domingan (Hatian) merchant, military officer, and revolutionary Vincent Ogé

The Siege of Savannah (September 16 - October 18, 1779)

Ronald Angelo Johnson, Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (University of Georgia Press, 2014)

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995)

Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776-1891 (1941)

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Y’know how sometimes you think a talk with someone is going to be about one thing, and it turns out to give so much more? This was one of those kinds of discussions, as Javier and I went from Austin history, to academic freedom and political censorship, to the dangers of intellectual exploitation. You are sure to take away something from this conversation, and from Javier’s work.

In this conversation, we discuss:

Black Austin Tours

AfroLatino Travel

Dash Harris

The George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center

Black Austin Tours on CNN

Dr. Anthony Brown, UT Austin

Dr. Leonard Brown, UT Austin

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In this conversation we discuss:

Ekphrasis is a Greek term meaning “description,” and refers to a type of poetry that is a vivid description of a work of art.

The legacy of artist Pablo Picasso has been debated throughout the art world.

“A Mona Lisa Fake? UC Neurologist Suggests Leonardo Painted Deceptive Smile,” Cincinnati Business Courier (June 7, 2019).

Marvel Entertainment’s trailer for WandaVision (2021).

The music of Hans Zimmer.

The artist Sally Mann.

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