Black Writers Read

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This episode features our latest livestreamed from Sunday, June 4, 2023 with our guest, Itua Uduebo to discuss his debut novel, Parade of Streetlights.

Itua was born in Lagos, Nigeria and currently resides in New York, NY. He graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in International Politics and works in the financial technology industry. Itua's writing journey began in 2016 and to date, he has several essays, articles, freeform poems, and short stories published online and in print. His work explores multiple genres including new adult fiction, urban literature, science fiction, thrillers, politics, racial justice, culture, and global affairs. Itua is working on his second novel manuscript and always looking to take on new creative challenges.

Told in vignettes, Parade of Streetlights is a deeply personal and introspective novel that features characters who are working through many personal absurdities. Published by Read Furiously, this is a novel about the choices we make, the ways we restrict ourselves needlessly, and the freedom of embracing the authentic pursuit of happiness. Kola's voice is a welcome addition to the literary canon and his story will stay with you long after the last page is finished.

Parade of Streetlights celebrated its release on Tuesday, June 6. It is available for purchase wherever you get your books.

To learn more about Itua and his work, please visit his website at ituauduebo.com.

Find Itua on Instagram: @i.uduebo. 

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This episode features our latest livestreamed from Saturday, May 13, 2023 in honor of Mother’s Day weekend. We chatted with poet and nonfiction writer, Shirley A. Jones Luke who read for our 2021 Black History Month virtual event.

Shirley A. Jones Luke is a poet and writer. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. Luke has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems focus on culture, family, and society. Ms. Luke is working on her first collection entitled Traumaland, a manuscript in progress. 

When preparing for Black Writers Read, we ask each guest on why do they write. Here’s what Shirley had to share:

"I write to survive. Writing keeps me alive. I write because I owe my deceased mother a book. I write for the future. My words and works will outlive me. Writing is immortality. I write to share and to inform. I write because there are those who wish to erase our stories from history. I write because our stories matter. At this time, there are those who worship guns over people. There are those who want to ban our books. I write to stop the erasure of my people's history in this country. Poetry is a powerful medium. I use poetry to express my feelings and thoughts. Poetry is a flexible form. I can do so much with my words through poetry."

Shirley’s work is available on her website at allpoetry.com/Sjluke. Also find her work on Medium.

To follow Shirley's writing journey on Instagram: @writercreativessjl
To follow Shirley's love of fashion on Instagram: @fashionistasjl

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This episode features our conversation with Lisbeth White (poetry. prose.), which was livestreamed on Saturday, April 29, 2023. Lisbeth is the author of the 2022 Perugia Prize winning poetry collection, AMERICAN SYCAMORE. 

From the bayou, to Belgium, to Barbados, AMERICAN SYCAMORE examines the Black diaspora, ancestral reparation, and the sacred feminine. In pursuit of understanding the nuances of belonging and displacement in a Black mixed-race feminine body, Lisbeth White travels through mythic, biological, and geological landscapes, attending to the body and its beautiful and terrifying questions.

Lisbeth White is a writer and ritualist living on S’klallam and Chimacum lands of Port Townsend, Washington. As a cross-genre writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, her writing explores the sensual and sociopolitical intersections of healing, ancestry, mythopoetics, and connection to the natural world. She has received support from VONA, Artist’s Trust, Tin House, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli, Apogee Lit, Green Mountains Review, Willowherb Review, EcoTheo Review, Split this Rock, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection American Sycamore, winner of the 2022 Perugia Press Prize and co-editor of the anthology, Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, published by North Atlantic Books, which is scheduled to be released in May.

To learn more about Lisbeth, please visit her website at www.lisbethwrites.com.

This episode is presented in collaboration with Perugia Press.  To learn more about Perugia Press, please visit: https://perugiapress.org/

Find Lisbeth on Instagram: @earthmaven

Find Perugia Press on Instagram: @perugiapress

Find Perugia Press on Twitter: @perugiapress

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This episode features our conversation with certified doula, writer, book coach, and host of the Write to Heal Podcast, Danielle Jernigan, which was livestreamed on Saturday, April 15, 2023 during Black Maternal Health Week.

During our conversation, we talked about Daniellle's writing for popular audiences, how her past work experience in medical research pairs nicely with her current writing endeavors, and briefly about her current manuscript in development, Healing Mother Wounds.

Danielle's work in maternal health focuses on helping doulas leverage their expertise and creative aspirations so they can write a heart-centered book that elevates their presence and attracts aligned clients with ease. Danielle's writing has been featured in Madame Noire Magazine, Your Tango, and Nourishing Word Blog and she’d been quoted in the Washington Post, New York Times Parenting Newsletter, and POPSUGAR Wellness. 

Prior to pursuing her literary career, she spent 20 years in medical research which garnered her co-authorship in 20 publications, including two textbooks. Her academic checklist includes a bachelor’s in biology from Delaware State University. Master in medical science from Indiana University School of Medicine and Graduate Studies in Publishing and Creative Writing at Drexel University. 

She's a vegan in principle — more of a whole foods-based flexitarian who won’t eat certain meats. But loves ethnic food so much she'll dabble here and there. She describes herself as a super opinionated introvert and quite bookish who loves art museums and sculptures, Japanese gardens, and black-and-white movies. Long drives towards the ocean and homegrown watermelons with seeds. She's the mother of two children and resides in Indiana with her youngest daughter Zoë. Danielle is represented by Carly Watters of PSI Literary Agency.

To learn more about Danielle, please visit her website at www.daniellejerniganauthor.com.

Find Danielle on Instagram: @daniellejerniganauthor

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This episode features our conversation with Enzo Silon Surin, which was livestreamed on Saturday, April 8, 2023. We talked about their most recent books including When My Body was a Clinched Fist and the forthcoming poetry collection, American Scapegoat.

Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born, award-winning poet, educator, librettist, publisher and social advocate. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry and the forthcoming collection, American Scapegoat which will also be published by Black Lawrence Press and will be released in May (which is available for pre-order). He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience which was published by Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022, and the recipient of a New England Poetry Club grant, a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a PEN New England Discovery Award and a 2020 Denis Diderot Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France.

Being a product of two countries, Enzo Silon Surin has dedicated his life and career to affecting social change through creative and critical writing and gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls “broken spaces”. 

Surin teaches creative writing and literature at Bunker Hill Community College and is also Founding Editor and Publisher at Central Square Press and Founder/Executive Director at the Faraday Publishing Company, Inc., a nonprofit literary services and social advocacy organization.

To learn more about Enzo, please visit their website at enzosurinink.org.

Find Enzo on Instagram: @enzothepoet. 

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This episode features our conversation with Philadelphia’s Dr. Raina J. León, which was livestreamed on Saturday, March 25, 2023 to talk about her expansive body of work.

Dr. Raina J. León is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, artist, digital archivist, podcaster, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work.  She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts, which celebrates its quince in 2023 and in that time has published nearly 1000 Latinx/Latine voices. She teaches at Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine and cohosts the podcast, Generational Archives, with Dr. Norma D. Thomas.

Raina believes in the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. As an educator of our present and future agitators, Dr. León served as full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, being only the third Black person and the first Afro-Latina to achieve this rank at the institution. In addition to her work as a digital archivist, Dr. León is an emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer. 

On the podcast, Generational Archives, Drs. Thomas and León present a show where they connect, heal, uncover through intergenerational conversations and archival research. A mother-daughter team, they have been collaborating on writing, facilitation, education projects, and research for ... well all of Raina's life. This podcast explores the closeness of their relationship and how they are together practicing attunement with their ancestors through their ancestral recovery work. They are pushing to learn the forgotten and erased names ... and will teach you how to do that, too!

To learn more about Raina and to purchase copies of her book, please visit her website at rainaleon.com.

Find Raina on Instagram:  @rainaleon.

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This episode features our conversation with self-help and business author, La’Vista Jones, which was livestreamed on Saturday, March 18, 2023 to talk about her latest book, The BOSS™ Shift.

La’Vista Jones is the founder and CEO of 31 Marketplace, an agency committed to helping women do the work they love, without sacrificing themselves to do it. 

As a corporate dropout, turned entrepreneur she is on a mission to challenge women to cultivate their own definition of success and to live life on their own terms. La’Vista is a business consultant, professional speaker, host of the BOSS™ Talk podcast and published author. Her latest book, The BOSS™ Shift which was released in October of 2022, is anchored in implementing her signature framework that focuses on battling overwhelm with systems and self-care. 

La’Vista is an Ohio native and bleeds scarlet and gray - go Buckeyes! She’s married to her college sweetheart Stewart and they share their home in Arizona with their son, publicly known as The Cub.

To learn more about La’Vista and to purchase an autographed copy of her book, please visit her website at lavistajones.com.

Find La'Vista on Instagram: @lavistajones

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This episode features our conversation with Regine Jackson, which was hosted live at The Artist Cafe in Downtown Springfield, Massachusetts on February 12, 2023.

Regine Jackson is a writer who was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. Born in 1997, Jackson has been an avid reader since she was a child. She always wished to write, specifically stories where the main characters looked like her and the people she interacted with on a daily basis. Jackson’s mother worked as a clerk and a page across different libraries in the city and would bring her back a multitude of books to read. Her favorite genres included science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. She also enjoyed reading graphic novels and comics, including manga. This voracious appetite for escape from her reality would be the eventual start of an interest in putting her own words on paper.

While Jackson mainly writes short stories within the science-fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, she also writes prose and poetry revolving around her life living in the inner city.

Jackson is currently working on the manuscript for her first full-length young adult urban horror novel, as well as planning a YA dark fantasy/horror trilogy series. Having first-hand experience with dealing with trauma, poverty, and inner city violence, and witnessing how drug addiction can ravage a community, she hopes to not only hone her own craft but to bring more creative work to her city and encourage more BIPOC women to write their truths.

Regine is the current Emerging Writer Fellow with Straw Dog Writers Guild which supports women and gender expansive writers of color at the early stages of their career. 

Learn more about Regine by visiting: reginejackson.com.

This event was presented in collaboration with Straw Dog Writers Guild which supports writers of all genres and abilities based in the four counties of Western Massachusetts. They provide free or low cost workshops, author readings, and showcases both online and in person. Visit Straw Dog Writers Guild online at strawdogwriters.org to learn about their programs and events.

Special thanks to David Maynard and the staff of The Artist Cafe for not only hosting us but for fostering a community space for us to work, convene, and celebrate the creativity among the Greater Springfield community. The Artist Cafe is a coffee house based in Downtown Springfield. They host a regular live music series, book clubs, and art exhibits. To learn more about them, please visit their website at artcoffeewine.com.

Find Regine on Instagram: @theflimsyquill
Find Straw Dog Writers Guild on Instagram: @strawdogwriters
Find The Artist Cafe on Instagram: @theartistcafema

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This episode features our conversation with Shanita Hubbard, which was livestreamed on Sunday, January 29, 2023.

Shanita Hubbard is the author of the book, Ride-Or-Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-Being of Black Women.  Her writing has also appeared in numerous outlets, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, The Guardian, and more  She is also a journalism instructor at the University of Toronto, a Soros Fellow, and the recipient of the La Maison Baldwin Fellowship.  Her book, Ride-Or-Die, was published by Legacy Lit Books and released this past November.

To learn more about Shanita, please visit her website at shanitahubbard.com.

Find Shanita on Instagram: @professor_nita.

Hubbard's Ride-Or-Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-Being of Black Women is available for purchase via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org. 

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This episode features our conversations with Tricia Elam Walker
(adult fiction. children's books. plays. short stories. essays.) from Episode Four, Tara Betts (poetry) from Episode Five, and Toni Ann Johnson
(literary fiction--novel. short story.) from Episode Eight - all from Season Three.

We wanted an opportunity to examine how some of our guests approach craft and constructing worlds within specific literary genres. Tricia, Tara, and Toni Ann are not only writers who have written for various platforms and diverse audiences, they are each college educators. So talking with folks who demystify the craft for today’s emerging writers was definitely a way that we wanted to celebrate Black History Month this time around. They each offer unique perspectives on devising characters, exploring and challenging their own genres, and more importantly, examine an African-American experience.

Learn more about our guests featured in this bonus episode:

Tricia Elam Walker
Website: triciaelamwalker.com
IG: @triciawriting

Tara Betts
IG: @tarabettschitown

Toni Ann Johnson
Website: toniannjohnson.com
IG: @treeladytoniann

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