Black Market Reads

In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with poet Danez Smith about his latest work, BLUFF.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetry's collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem--part map, part annotation, part visual argument--offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love--those given and made--are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Danez Smith is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Don't Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award.

Our production team for this episode includes co producers/ Lissa Jones and Edie French, co-host/Bukata Hayes, technical director/Paul Auguston, The Voice/Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration/Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting On Health focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture.

Black Market Reads: On Health is a collaboration with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross’ long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible. 

In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with author Taiyon J. Coleman author of Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America ( University of Minnesota Press).

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family—an act at once a responsibility and a privilege—bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.

Our production team for this episode includes co producers/ Lissa Jones and Edie French, co-host/Bukata Hayes, technical director/Paul Auguston, The Voice/Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration/Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting On Health focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture.

Black Market Reads: On Health is a collaboration with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross’ long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible. 

In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with author Sarai Johnson about her debut novel, Grown Women (Harper Collins 2024). Join us in this lively and thoughtful conversation about what it means to move on—or not move on—from trauma. What it means to ask for forgiveness, what true forgiveness means, how anger can manipulate our relationships, and what happens after the trauma and how it travels through bloodlines.

Tracing four generations of remarkable black women, Johnson follows the family across the decades as they grapple with motherhood and daughterhood, inherited trauma, and the deeply ingrained wounds that divide them while they attempt to redefine happiness and healing for themselves. Exploring how race, gender, and class can influence familial relationships, and how pain—and hope—can be handed down from mother to daughter.

Black Market Reads is produced by The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature in partnership with iDream.tv. 

Funding for Black Market Reads: On Health is provided by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross’ long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible.

For Go Deeper information and more episodes visit BlackMarketReads.com

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     In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health, Lissa and Bukata talk with Dr. Rachel Hardeman. Dr. Rachel Hardeman is a Tenured Professor & Researcher, Speaker & Thought Leader, Educator & Author on all things health equity. As the Blue Cross Endowed Professor of Health & Racial Equity, Dr. Hardeman’s goal is to manifest racial justice so that all people, especially Black women and girls, can live their full greatness and glory. As Founding Director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity (CARHE, pronounced "care") at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Hardeman’s work is centered on the notion that the work of antiracism is fueled by love. She was named as one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2024.

     Learn more in the GO DEEPER section of our website: https://blackmarketreads.com/

This episode of Black Market Reads was recorded before a live audience at the historic Capri Theater in North Minneapolis.

Lissa talks with author Karen Felicia Nance about her latest book Ethel Ray: Living in the White, Gray and Black, the story of her grandmother's contributions to Civil Rights.

Ethel Ray’s world was a white world. She was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where her family lived a life filled with marginalization, prejudice, and racism. She experienced constant comparison to whiteness—a place that held no space for her Black Southern father, William Henry Ray, or her white Swedish mother, Inga Ray.

Ethel Ray: Living in the White, Gray, and Black is a biography and coming-of-age story of Ethel and of her family’s life before, during, and after the horrific lynching of three young Black circus workers—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—on June 15, 1920.

Learn more, visit: www.BlackMarketReads.com for GO DEEPER content

Black Market Reads is produced by The Givens Foundation for African American Literature in partnership with iDream.TV. Black Market Reads is made possible through the generous support of our individual donors and the voters of Minnesota, through the Minnesota State Arts Board with support from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with Author Dolen Perkins-Valdez about her latest book Take My Hand. As a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life, Dolen talks about her research, her passion for uplifting the authentic voice and the responsibility we have for the fallout of our good deeds.

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench. 

Black Market Reads is produced by The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature in partnership with iDream.tv. 

Funding for Black Market Reads: On Health is provided by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross’ long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible.

In this inaugural episode of Black Market Reads: On Health, Lissa Jones introduces her series co-host Bukata Hayes, Vice President and Chief Equity Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Together they welcome their guest Linda Villarosa, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and contributor to the NYT 1619 Project.

There’s an alarming saying in medical circles that Black people in the US “live sicker and die quicker.” Linda Villarosa, explores this phenomenon in her book UNDER THE SKIN: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America. Villarosa finds that erroneous beliefs about Black bodies, dating from the time of enslavement, continue to influence medical practices today. Coping with the daily stress of racism ages Black people prematurely. And racist beliefs held by doctors and other medical professionals often keep Black people from getting the care they need.

Black Market Reads is produced by the Givens Foundation for African-American Literature in partnership with iDream.tv. Funding for this series is provided by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross’ long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible.

Series artwork created by Ta-coumba T. Aiken

In this episode Lissa welcomes co-host Bukata Hayes as they explore the power of storytelling and the nourishment of soulful food with author Rose McGee.

ROSE MCGEE, founder of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, travels across the United States to deliver pies and nurture relationships. She was featured in the 2015 PBS documentary A Few Good Pie Places. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, her caring community pie baking and delivery gained recognition from NBC Nightly News, Ms McGee resides in Golden Valley, MiN, where she was named “Citizen of the Year”.

How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools

The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, it explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.

Keith A. Mayes is associate professor of African American & African Studies and faculty affiliate in sociocultural studies in education at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African American Holiday Tradition.

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Seph Rodney, PhD was born in Jamaica, and came of age in the Bronx, New York. He has an English degree from Long Island University, Brooklyn; a studio art MFA from the University of California, Irvine; and a PhD in museum studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. While in London, he created, produced, and hosted a radio show called The Thread.

Seph Rodney, PhD, is a former senior critic and opinion editor for Hyperallergic. He has written for the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and other publications. He is featured on the podcast The American Age. 

His book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, was published by Routledge in 2019. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize. In 2022 he won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

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