Dorothy Roberts joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her father’s interviews beginning in the 1930s with over 500 back-white couples who crossed the color line in Chicago,  moving to memoir to explore more personal experiences and feelings, growing up in a mixed race family, shifting the lens onto herself, thinking about identity, finding answers via the writing process, staying motivated and organized while working with heaps of material, the mystery in memoir, bringing the reader into the discovery process, the adventure of not knowing, looking for evidence people can love across racial boundaries, and her new book The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race and Family.

Info/Registration for Ronit’s 10-Week Memoir Class Memoir Writing:Finding Your Story https://www.pce.uw.edu/courses/memoir-writing-finding-your-story

Also in this episode:

-taking breaks

-working with source material

-the possibility of racial harmony in America

Books mentioned in this episode:

-The Color of Water by James McBride

-South to America by Imani Perry

-The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

-The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of five books, including Killing the Black Body, a MacArthur Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Connect with Dorothy:

Website: https://www.dorothyeroberts.com/

Get the book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mixed-Marriage-Project/Dorothy-Roberts/9781668068380

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Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories. 

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

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