Saturday Mornings with Joy Keys

Brittany K. Barnett is an award-winning attorney and entrepreneur focused on social impact investing. She is dedicated to transforming the criminal justice system and has won freedom for numerous clients serving life sentences for federal drug offenses—seven of whom received executive clemency from President Barack Obama. Brittany has founded several nonprofits and social enterprises, such as XVI Capital Partners, Milena Reign LLC, the Buried Alive Project, and Girls Embracing Mothers. She has earned many honors, including being named one of America's most Outstanding Young Lawyers by the American Bar Association.

A Knock at Midnight book: Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole—for a first-time drug offense. In Sharanda, Brittany saw haunting echoes of her own life, as the daughter of a formerly incarcerated mother. As she studied this case, a system came into focus in which widespread racial injustice forms the core of America’s addiction to incarceration. Moved by Sharanda’s plight, Brittany set to work to gain her freedom.

 Website:https://www.brittanykbarnett.com/the-book

Marita Golden attended public schools in Washington, D.C. and graduated from American University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. She has been a faculty member in the MFA Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the MA Program in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University and a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the District of Columbia and Prince George’s Community College.

She has lectured and taught internationally, at universities in Israel, Turkey, and Spain. Her many awards include the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award presented by Poets and Writers, Distinguished Service Award from the Authors Guild, Maryland Author Award from the Association of Maryland Librarians, Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and induction into the International Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University.

Her articles and essays have been published in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Essence, and The Root.

Marita Golden has spoken or lectured at over 80 colleges and universities, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia College, Medgar Evers College, Brandeis University, Bethune-Cookman University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Vanderbilt University.

As a literary activist, with Clyde McElvene, she cofounded the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation that has been supporting the international community of Black writers for three decades

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.

He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere.

Clint is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a 2017 recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. His two TED Talks, The Danger of Silence and How to Raise a Black Son in America, collectively have been viewed more than 9 million times.

He currently teaches writing and literature in the D.C. Central Detention Facility. He is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History.

Clint received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Special guest: Gugulethu Mhlungu.

Gugulethu Mhlungu is a writer, broadcaster and editor and has held positions as deputy editor of Bona, hosted NightTalk on Radio702 and Breaking Dawn on Newzroom Afrika.  Mhlungu's personal accolades include a National Arts Festival/Business Art SA silver award for feature writing and Media24 legends Columnist of the Year. She lives in Joburg.

Drawing on the experiences of women ranging from political activists to domestic workers, sex workers and students, commentator and writer Gugulethu Mhlungu examines how history has shaped the conditions women face today. She also considers the impact of pass laws, land dispossession, racial discrimination and gender-based violence. She concludes that there is still plenty of work to be done in making real the South Africa imagined by the Constitution.

Special Guest: Singer Lynne Fiddmont

Lynne’s list of credits include an astounding array of legendary artists such as; Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Natalie Cole, Bill Withers, Nancy Wilson, Madonna, Burt Bacharach, Elton John, B.B. King, Kenny (Babyface) Edmonds, The Crusaders, Patti Austin, George Duke, Herbie Hancock, Barbra Streisand, Miley Cyrus, Sheila E., Dave Brubeck, Bobby Womack, Steve Tyrell, Usher, Josh Groban, Johnny Mathis, Timothy B. Schmit, James Ingram, Kenny Loggins, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan, Ray Charles, Stanley Clarke and more.

Most recently, Lynne worked on the critically acclaimed artist, St. Vincent’s latest CD, Daddy’s Home.

She has released 4 critically acclaimed self-produced CD’s featuring many of her own compositions with guest artists such as George Duke, Gerald Albright, Kirk Whalum, Billy Childs and Christian McBride.

She has written music for and award wining HBO Short film entitled MUTED and has written jingles for ads, most notable for Lexus for their Christmas campaign.

Her television appearances include the: Grammy Awards, BET Awards, MTV Awards, CMA Awards, UNCF Awards, Billboard Awards, Johnny Carson Show, Jay Leno Show, Arsenio Hall Show, Regis and Kelly, David Letterman, MTV Unplugged, Good Morning America, Motown Live, Ellen Degeneres, and Live at the White House honoring Stevie Wonder and The Super Bowl Halftime Show with Stevie Wonder.

She has performed in Africa, Australia, South America, North America, Asia, The Middle East, Europe, and the United Kingdom.

Andrea Lee is an American-born author of novels, memoirs and short fiction that explore themes of identity and concepts of foreignness. Her writing takes on the borderlands, creating an ongoing dialogue around the places where cultures, races and imaginations intersect.  Her subject matter often draws on her childhood in a middle-class Black family whose children "pioneered" into white spaces, and on her adult life as a world traveler and expatriate in Europe.

Born in Philadelphia, she attended the Baldwin School, and received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard University.  She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, W, the New York Times Book Review, and Airmail.  Her books include the National Book Award-nominated memoir  Russian Journal, the novel Sarah Phillips,  the short story collection Interesting Women, and the novel Lost Hearts in Italy.

Her latest  book, Red Island House (Scribner, 2021) is a travel epic set in the African nation of Madagascar, that examines post-colonial themes of class and race and fantasies of tropical paradise through the eyes of an adventurous Black American heroine.

Alexis Henderson is a speculative fiction writer with a penchant for dark fantasy, witchcraft, and cosmic horror. She grew up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, which instilled in her a life-long love of ghost stories. Currently, Alexis resides in Columbus, Ohio, where she's learning to cope with the cold.

ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE WITCHING

A young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society discovers dark powers within herself in this stunning, feminist fantasy debut.

 

In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet’s word is law, Immanuelle Moore’s very existence is blasphemy. Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission, devotion, and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement.

Special Guest: Actor Camron Jones

Camron has quickly positioned himself as a one-to-watch. This year, Camron stars in the Amazon Prime series “Panic.” Based on Lauren Oliver’s bestselling novel of the same name, the drama series follows a group of high school graduates who compete in a series of challenges to escape the small Texas town they live in. Once the rules change, they must decide how much they are willing to risk in order to leave their hometown. Camron stars as Bishop, an athlete and solid A student whose lifetime of inherited pressure begins to take its toll. 

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in San Ramon, CA, Camron discovered his passion for the arts after his mom persuaded him to compete in a speech & debate tournament. Before he knew it, Jones was traveling all over the country competing in the dramatic interpretation category. He eventually received a BFA in Acting from the University of Southern California, where he got the opportunity to study abroad in Oxford and fine-tune Shakespearean text. His television debut came in 2018, appearing in Freeform’s hit series “grown-ish,” starring Yara Shahidi. Additional credits for him include USA Network’s “The Purge” and Showtime’s long-running drama series “Shameless.”

Performer, writer, and activist Staceyann Chin is the author of the poetry collection Crossfire: A Litany for Survival (2019), winner of the American Book Award, and the memoir The Other Side of Paradise (2009). She received a 2003 Drama Desk Award for her performance in Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, which she cowrote with Russell Simmons. Chin is the author of the one-woman shows MotherStruck! (2015), Border/Clash (2005), Unspeakable Things (2001), and Hands Afire (2000). Her poems have been included in several anthologies, including Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry (2005) and Skyscrapers, Taxis, & Tampons (1999). Chin has also performed in both the stage and film versions of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States, at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and at numerous universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and the University of the West Indies.