The director of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Emerson College, Jabari Asim is the author of the novel Only the Strong, the story collection A Taste of Honey, and several works of nonfiction, including We Can't Breathe, The Art of Survival, and What Obama Means...For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future. Also a Guggenheim fellowship-winning poet, playwright, and children's book author, he formerly served as the editor-in-chief of the NAACP's official publication The Crisis, and was an editor and syndicated columnist at The Washington Post. In his new novel, Asim tells the story of a group of enslaved Black people seeking love, friendship, and independence in the 19th century United States South.

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity and Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home. A lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a teacher at the Paris Writers' Workshop, her achievements include a Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, and The Washington Post, among many other periodicals. Her most recent book is Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents.

(recorded 2/17/2022)