In this episode, I speak with writer, speaker, and lawyer, Savala Nolan.

Savala Nolan is a writer, speaker, and lawyer. Her first book, Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body is our Good Ancestor Book Club selection for the month of October 2021. 

Savala is executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She and her writing have been featured in Vogue, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, and more. She served as an advisor on the Peabody–winning podcast, The Promise. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Don't Let It Get You Down is a powerful collection of 12 memoiristic essays - lyrical and magnetic in their cadence - that offer poignant reflections on living between society’s most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces—between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.

Content warning: in the opening of this conversation, Savala shares her connection to her second great grandmother who was murdered at the hands of racist vigilantes in the 1890s.