For the smart and free-thinking, Black Market Reads is a podcast featuring conversations with today's most exciting Black literary voices. We are a podcast for any one who loves to read, write, and engage. Black Market Reads is a project of The Givens Foundation for African American Literature.
"What I want people, maybe beyond anything, to understand is that we, like poems, are capable of such complex juxtaposition and complication in our feelings towards things... And I know in an anti-Black world that is so good at hating us that there is a Black-loving world out there ... and in that Black-loving world …
Continue reading "Exploring Hope and Identity in Danez Smith’s _BLUFF_"
“Change is going to happen whether we like it or not. You can either be dragging, kicking and screaming, or you can be part of the change.“ -Taiyon J. Coleman LISTEN https://givensbmr.libsyn.com/tai-coleman In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with author Taiyon J. Coleman author of Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying …
"What I want readers to think of when they see grown women is a process of achieving, it's never really achieved." -Sarai Johnson Tracing four generations of remarkable Black women, Sarai Johnson follows the family across the decades as they grapple with motherhood and daughterhood, inherited trauma, and the deeply ingrained wounds that divide them while they …
Continue reading "Generational Trauma and Healing in Grown Women: A Conversation with Sarai Johnson"
Recorded before a live audience at the Capri Theater in North Minneapolis, Lissa talks with author Karen Nance about her latest book Ethel Ray: Living in the White, Gray, and Black, published by In Black Ink 2024 Ethel Ray Nance was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where her family lived a life filled with …
Continue reading "BONUS Episode: Karen Nance – Ethel Ray, Living in the White, Gray, and Black"
"If we didn't have health inequities any longer, if everybody were getting the same amount of care, we'd still need to know this history, but it wouldn't be as urgent. I think the fact that Black women still experience disproportionately higher rates of maternal morbidity is relevant. We need to know why that is. We …
"This has to be an all hands on deck situation where we say, we are going to, together, as a country, solve this problem. I think that might be magical thinking in this world we're in right now, but I do see some steps ahead.." Linda Villarosa In this inaugural episode of Black Market Reads: …
Continue reading "Linda Villarosa, UNDER THE SKIN – The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America"
"Repositioning ourselves to storiesprovides encouragement, it fortifies us, it edifies us, and it compels us to live out the resilience, the excellence of a people."Bukata Hayes In this episode Lissa welcomes co-host Bukata Hayes as they explore the power of storytelling and the nourishment of soulful food with author Rose McGee. ROSE MCGEE, founder of …
“If we are not maladjusted to this situation, something is wrong with us.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Unteachables (University of Minnesota Press 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, Mayes …
" Invisibility is one of racism's strongest tools. Racism is most powerful when we don't see it.” Dr. Rob Eschmann From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends …
Continue reading "Rob Eschmann, When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age"
"Fiction is all conflict and tension and making your characters uncomfortable and seeing what they do with that uncomfortableness. I can't imagine writing a police procedural set in Chicago and not talk about race." Tracy Clark In this episode Lissa talks with author Tracy Clark about Fall, the second book in her Detective Harriet Foster thriller series, weaving …