Every Tongue Got to Confess Podcast

During the 2020 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, interviewer Kimberly Williams talked with Iheoma Nwachukwu about Afrofuturism. Nwachukwu is a fiction writer and poet from Nigeria. In this conversation, Nwachukwu reflects on the realities of African culture captured by contemporary Afrofuturist practice.

During the 2020 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, interviewer Grace Chun talked with Tenea Johnson about Afrofuturism. Johnson is a speculative fiction author, poet, and musician. She is the author of several books, including Smoketown: A Novel as well as Starting Friction, a collection of poetry and prose.

During the 2020 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, interviewer Grace Chun talked with Phenderson Djeli Clark about Afrofuturism. Clark is a writer of speculative fiction, including The Black God's Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. In this conversation, he recounts the complex journey that defines his black speculative practice.

During the 2020 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, interviewer Tiffany Pennamon talked with Chesya Burke about her work in Afrofuturism. Burke is an editor, educator, and author of comic books and speculative fiction, including The Strange Crimes of Little Africa, and Let's Play White. Burke shares her vision of how black writers reach back to the past to reframe the future.

During the ZNH Festival of the Arts and Humanities, Kimberly Williams talked with Maurice Broaddus in Eatonville, Florida about his work. Broaddus is a writer, a community organizer, and a teacher who uses Afrofuturism in his writing and life. His books The Knights of Breton Court Trilogy, the steampunk novel, Pimp My Airship, and the YA detective novel, The Usual Suspects.

During the 2020 Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, Dr. Michele Berger spoke about her work and the wider implications of Afrofuturism. Dr. Berger is an award-winning scholar and writer who sheds light on the ways Afrofuturism centers the transformative vision offered by black women.

Dr. Reynaldo Anderson gave the keynote presentation at the 2020 Zora Neale Hurston Festival Academic Conference. His lecture, “Afrofuturism: The Rise of the Black Speculative Tradition” offered a holistic view of the long tradition of black speculative practice. Dr. Anderson is co-editor of the book, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness and executive director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM).

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Kinitra Brooks. Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. In this conversation, she explores the roots and meaning of Afrofuturism.

During the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, Dr. Isiah Lavender reflected on questions of race, meaning, and culture inspired by Afrofuturism.

In this episode, Holly Baker talks with Dr. Julian Chambliss about Afrofuturism and the Zora Neale Hurston Festival.