At the Fourth Annual Celebration of Diverse Literary Voices of Texas: Protests and Civil Rights on Saturday, July 11, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. on Zoom, the panelists engaged in a wide ranging discussion over lessons to be learned from the past work of civil rights leaders for the activists of today. The panelists were Peniel E. Joseph, author of THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Linder, President of the Austin NAACP, Reginald Owens, former Chair of the Journalism Department, Louisiana Tech University, and Brandon K. Winford, author of JOHN HERVEY WHEELER: Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights.

Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. Dr. Joseph is also the author of WAITING 'TIL THE MIDNIGHT HOUR: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, DARK DAYS, BRIGHT NIGHTS: From Black Power to Barack Obama, and STOKELY: A Life.

Nelson Linder has served as the president of the Austin NAACP since 2000. He has won numerous awards for his civil rights activism including the Austin Urban League Whitney Young Award, the National NAACP Rupert Richardson Award,

the University of Texas at Austin Dr. James Hill Community Circle Award, and the Austin Community College Lifetime Achievement Award, 2018.

Reginald Owens was formerly the Chair of Journalism at Louisiana Tech University where he retired in 2016. He began his professional career as a police reporter at the Houston Post and later worked as managing editor of The (Houston) Informer, the third oldest black newspaper in the nation, and was a founding vice president of the Houston Association of Black Journalists.

Brandon Winford is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a historian of the late nineteenth and twentieth century United States and the African American experience, and his research focuses on the relationship between civil rights and black capitalism.

What are the challenges of writing and publishing the first novel, your second book or your third book? With the collection of writers on this podcast from a Zoom event sponsored by KAZI Book on June 13, 2020, we discussed novels in the political thriller, crime fiction, science fiction/fantasy genres, and a short story collection. We explored not only the themes of their most recently published books, but their unique journeys in writing and publishing them. Meng Jin, author of the novel LITTLE GODS, and Richard Santos, author of the novel TRUST ME, just published their debut novels in 2020. For Rion Amilcar-Scott, his short story collection THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU, published in 2019, was his second book. And for science fiction/fantasy writer Nicky Drayden, ESCAPING EXODUS, published in 2019, was her third book.

On this special edition of KAZI Book Review we are featuring former Austin Community College (ACC) creative writing students reading from their unpublished work at the Fourth Annual Celebration of Diverse Literary Voices of Texas held on Zoom on September 19. Former ACC students Christina Brunson, Vanessa Rose and Dionn Schaffner read from their work. Charlotte Gullick, chair of the ACC Creative writing Department moderated the readings.

In DARE TO SPEAK, Suzanne Nossel,, delivers a  guide to maintaining democratic debate that is open, free-wheeling but at the same time respectful of the rich diversity of backgrounds and opinions in a changing country. Centered on practical principles, Nossel’s primer equips readers with the tools needed to speak one’s mind in today’s diverse, digitized, and highly-divided society without resorting to curbs on free expression.

Suanne Nossel is the CEO of PEN America, an  organization working to protect and advance human rights, free expression and literature.  She has also served as the Chief Operating Officer of Human Rights Watch and as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. During the first term of the Obama Administration, Nossel served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, where she led U.S. engagement in the United Nations and multilateral institutions, on human rights and humanitarian issues.

BANKING ON FREEDOM is the first full-length history of finance capitalism that centers black women and the banking institutions and networks they built from the eve of the Civil War to the Great Depression. Black women played essential roles in black communities’ efforts to use finance to carve out possibilities within U.S. capitalism and society.  In particular she shares the story of Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to organize a bank and lead a bank.  In 1903 she organized the St. Luke Penny Bank in Richmond, Virginia.

An Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, Shennette Garrett-Scott is a historian of gender, race, and capitalism.

In December of 2013, Raphael Warnock senior pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta published his first book, THE DIVIDED MIND OF THE BLACK CHURCH: theology, piety and public witness. In the book, he traces the historical significance of the rise in development of black theology as an important conversation partner for the black church. He discusses how black theology has emphasized the role of Christian faith in addressing racism and other forms of oppression, arguing that Jesus urged his disciples to seek the freedom of all people. I interviewed Reverend Warnock in January of 2014.

This is part two of my interview with Karl Turner, president of A La Care Specialty Foods. Karl has been selling packaged seafood products across the United States since 2003. Based in the New Orleans metro area, his company thrived in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, survived the death of demand for his shrimp products after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and is currently rebuilding sales after COVID 19 shut down his primary customer base of restaurants. In this two part interview we discussed his career journey to entrepreneurship, which included serving as executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing board and working as a Vice President at Xavier University of Louisiana.

In Matthew Pettway’s book, CUBAN LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF BLACK INSURRECTION He reveals how Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés used poetry to transform early Cuban literature into an instrument of black liberation from the 1820s to the 1840s. In 1844, Manzano and Valdés, who was known by the pen name Placido, were arrested and charged with aiding and abetting a conspiracy to abolish slavery and depose the regime.

Matthew Pettway is an assistant professor of Spanish who focuses on Spanish Language, Latin American Literature, and Afro-Caribbean Studies.

On part 2 of this special edition of KAZI Book Review we are featuring Austin area emerging writers Drew Carpenter, Kendra Christel, Jacob Grovey, and Chaitali Sen reading from their unpublished work at the Fourth Annual Celebration of Diverse Literary Voices of Texas, a live Zoom event, on September 19.  Dionn Schaffner, a former Austin Community College creating writing student,  introduced the panel.

On this special edition of KAZI Book Review we are featuring Austin area emerging writers Jennifer Hritz, Jedah Mayberry, Ursula Pike, and Richard Z. Santos reading from their unpublished work at the Fourth Annual Celebration of Diverse Literary Voices of Texas, a live Zoom event, on September 19.  Dionn Schaffner, a former Austin Community College creating writing student,  introduced the panel.