The Sheri Show

In this episode, I talk with Faramola S. about Marlon James' fourth novel, Black Leopard Red Wolf, the first book in The Dark Star Trilogy. It was such an expansive conversation, we had to split it across two episodes to capture all the nuances of our love for the book as well as the things about it that challenged us.

The Sheri Show is back for a second season! In the season opener, Sheri discusses with her fellow sister scholars Deesha Philyaw's much celebrated short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. It was hard to talk about such an intimate collection without revealing too many personal details about our own lives, but one thing is for sure, as much as we read the collection, it certainly read us.

In this episode is an intimate conversation with one of my nearest, dearest, oldest, and besets friends, Anna-Bo. This wasn’t an easy one to record. We literally tried to do it on three different occasions. Failing each time. And even with the successful recording session, we kept getting cut off because of my profoundly abysmal internet service. Despite Mediacom’s obvious attempts at sabotage, we nonetheless persevered and I stitched 16 different audio tracks together, so you could hear a little bit about Bo and me and our friendship. Which is kinda like the process of making this recoding. Distance is a challenge, but we persevere through every single obstacle, and in the end, we have something beautiful.

Who knew it would take the whole first season to actually get to a show where we talk about books? Better late than never, yes? On this week’s episode I talk with Faramola Shonekan primarily about Raven Leilani's National Book Critics Circle Award winning debut novel Luster, but really also about so much more. In true The Sheri Show style too, we check our own ideas by thinking through their underlying assumptions and what we come away with are some solid insights for thinking about young Black female characters in contemporary novels and the people who write them.

Admittedly, in this week's episode, there are more rants than there are raves. But what can you do when you're talking to scholars of Black history and culture from different disciplines and the sequel to Coming To America? The Sister Scholars are back and we taking on Coming 2 America. Though the consensus is that we are entirely and collectively not here for it — not even for the ways it can help us think about Eddie Murphy as an auteur — we talk about, among other things, the possibilities of diasporic solidarity, what it means to be critical of a popular cultural product that others enjoy, and why Gladys Knight really shouldn’t participate in this kind of foolery.

Remember the banana bread phase of lockdown? How about when we began passing around sourdough starter to make bread? What do you do with your discard? I didn’t plan it this way, but somehow the recording and editing schedules aligned for me to present this week’s episode as one that commemorates one year since many of us in Columbia Missouri started to self isolate, amidst the rapid spread of the Covid 19 virus. In this episode, I talk with one of my friends, Julie Passanante Elman, about the used of food during the pandemic, how it impacts our relationships with others inside and outside our homes, and of course what to do with all that sourdough discard.

If you are like me, your social media habits have changed in significant ways over the last year. You may even have started to cultivate influencer aspirations. On this episode, I reflect with Sarah Brouillette about how we use Instagram both as people who love scrolling through workout and food posts and also as scholars who are curious about social media.

If you want to know more about Sarah's work on social media, you should check out her essay on influencer Caroline Calloway, and her essay on aspirational labor in I May Destroy You. Also, if you're interested in the kinds of conversations we have in our DMs, you should check out the bits we leaked recently to ASAP/Journal's "Thinking With" series.

Oh mah gawd, y'all!

The sound on the last few recordings gave me no end of grief! But the conversations were so organic and fun that I just couldn’t rerecord. After some effort and help, I got one remixed and cleaned up as best I could and now I have a new episode of The Sheri Show for you a week ahead of schedule!

On this episode we talk to my younger sister, Allison Harrison, who works as a film maker and digital production creative in Jamaica. Among the things we discuss is how the annual staging of the national Pantomime continues to impact her work, how sometimes you go to school to do one thing and leave with something else, and how even though the path isn't always clear, purpose may still lie ahead.

You can follow Allison on Instagram @factory_75 and subscribe to her YouTube channel Allison Harrison: The Series

What do you get when four non-18th Century scholars get together to talk about Shondaland's newest hit series Bridgerton? This episode of The Sheri Show of course! Joining me on this episode are my three sister scholars, Cristina, Keona, and Stephanie, and together we cut up about what we liked, what we didn't like and what it would take for us to watch a second season of Bridgerton. Special shoutout this week goes to Patricia Matthew's essay on Bridgerton in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Shondaland's Regency: On "Bridgerton," who I credit almost entirely with getting me to hit play for the first time on this show.

In this episode Lisa, Andy, and I talk about the films in our festival that we thought were the worst ones.. Among other things, you will hear how the debate about whether or not Black Orpheus and The Seventh Seal are similar movies ended, as well as who was not here for The Virgin Suicides, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and WW84. But also, if you’ve been making a list of things to see, we shout out more than a few more movies that we LOVE for things like the food, no Black suffering, and campy R&B soundtracks.