May Additions
A round-up of May 2026 additions to the podcast and Substack archive.
In this month’s newsletter:
What—there’s a newsletter?
As Seen In
New on the podcast in May
Continued conversations
One from the archive
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.