Today we have Venita Blackburn on the show. Works by Venita have appeared in newyorker.com, Harper’s, Story, McSweeney’s, Apogee, Split Lip Magazine, the Iowa Review, DIAGRAM, Foglifter, Electric Literature, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Her next collection of stories, HOW TO WRESTLE A GIRL, will be published in the fall of 2021 by MCD books.  She is the founder and president of Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Venita's Website 

Outline of Topics

Book Recommendations 

James Baldwin Everything

Toni Morrison Sula

Marjorie Liu Monstress Vol. 1

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone This Is How You Lose the Time War

Brian K Vaughan, Cliff Chiang, and Matt Wilson Paper Girls 

Venita's books Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl

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