July 20, 2021

Everyman is a Black Woman with M Shelly Conner

1 hour 10 minutes

On this episode of Black & Published, Nikesha is speaking with M Shelly Conner about her debut novel, everyman. M Shelly is a Chicago native who spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. That sprawl informs the work in everyman which M Shelly began working on first in 2005 and seriously during her PhD program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An excerpt of everyman appears in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. M Shelly is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives in Arkansas with her wife and their dog Whiskey.

Episode Notes

On this episode of Black & Published, Nikesha is speaking with M Shelly Conner about her debut novel, everyman. M Shelly is a Chicago native who spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. That sprawl informs the work in everyman which M Shelly began working on first in 2005 and seriously during her PhD program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An excerpt of everyman appears in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. M Shelly is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives in Arkansas with her wife and their dog Whiskey.

Over the course of the conversation M Shelly discusses the novel that made her want to get better at writing, crafting an epic generational story, and unpacking the so-called "phases" of life our parents' and grandparents' generation had knowledge of but never talked about.

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Follow @Nikesha_Elise on Twitter and Instagram and check out her latest novel Beyond Bourbon Street available everywhere books are sold.

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