Walter Hawthorne (History, MSU) is an expert on Africa and the Atlantic World in the era of the slave trade. We talk with him (and Joseph Lauer) about the history of rice farmers on the Upper Guinea Coast and the vigorous debate over Judith Carney's Black Rice thesis. Hawthorne closes by describing his forthcoming book Forging a Creole Atlantic: Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast, in Portugal and in Amazonia, 1650-1830.