Terry McMillan's novel was among a chorus of late twentieth-century books that signaled a reawakening in the African American cultural imagination and revealed a strong interest in the representation of Black love, romance, and marriage.
Episode by Aneeka Ayanna Henderson.
Episode read by Kassandra Timm.

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Aneeka Ayanna Henderson is a professor of American Studies at Amherst College. She is the  author of Veil and Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture.

A short take on how students at a college in Georgia respond to Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."
Episode by Jennifer Colatosti.
Read by Kassandra Timm.

Jennifer Colatosti is Associate Professor and Interim Associate Chair of English at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction, and since 2018 has co-organized the literary festival Revival: Lost Southern Voices.

Despite revieing positive reviews, why  did Sutton Griggs have some unfavorable feelings about the circumstances surrounding his first book?
Episode by John Gruesser.
Read by GiGi Monroe.

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Senior Research Scholar at Sam Houston State University, John Gruesser is the author of A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line (Oxford University Press 2022), the editor of Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction (Texas A&M University Press 2022), and the co-editor of a scholarly edition of Griggs’s 1905-06 novel The Hindered Hand (West Virginia University Press 2017), a Broadview Edition of Pauline E. Hopkins's 1901-02 serial novel Hagar's Daughter (2021), and African American Writers Respond to Poe, a special issue of the journal Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation (2023).

Here's a short take on where all those Black Women Writers courses come from. 
Episode by Howard Rambsy II.
Read by Kassandra Timm. 

Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give  found a raw edge that audiences were keen to address. 

Episode written by Ebony Lumumba, Ph.D. -- an associate professor and chair of English at Jackson State University.  She writes, teaches, and thinks most about Black women's resistance and Global South literature.

The episode is read by Kassandra Timm. 

College students are often excited to discuss the subtle radicalism of Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. 
Episode by Emily VanDette -- Professor of English at SUNY Fredonia.

The 1990s gave way to a vibrant literary outpouring of African American novels that offered myriad representational possibilities freeing readers and writers alike.
 
Episode by Richard Schur -- Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and co-editor (with Lovalerie King) of Justice Unveiled: African American Culture and the Law.
Episode read by Kassandra Timm

A graphic novel engages black history and Captain America.
Episode by Stephyn Phillips. Read by Kassandra Timm.  

How an excerpt from an upcoming novel became a popular short story. 
Episode by Kenton Rambsy.

A brief take on a photo titled "The Sisterhood, 1977," which has been a source of inspiration for countless readers and viewers. 
Episode by Courtney Thorsson. Read by Kassandra Timm. 

Courtney Thorsson, an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels and The Sisterhood: Black Women's Literary Organizing, an interpretive cultural history of The Sisterhood forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Courtney is grateful to poet and scholar Harryette Mullen for her work to correctly identify the women in the photo.