This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Kaila Story, who is the Audre Lorde Endowed Chair at the University of Louisville where teaches in the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Pan-African Studies. She is the author of The Rainbow Ain't Never Been Enuf: On The Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity (out in May 2025). She is also the co-creator, co-producer, and co-host of Louisville Public Media’s Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture, and Black Gay Life, a popular award-winning podcast. In this conversation, we discuss how questions of gender and sexuality shift the field of Black Studies, the expansiveness of Black Studies insights, and the relationship between study, conversation, and the classroom.