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.
There is nothing that is new in The house on Rondo because it's happening around us all the time. Black neighborhoods are being gentrified, they're being destroyed, in the name of progress again. And who loses out ...?Debra Stone When thirteen-year-old Zenobia has to leave her friends and spend the summer at Grandma’s while Mama …
African American literature is more than stories, poems, and novels. It's a living testament of our ability to endure, to resist, and to thrive in environments that weren't designed for us. From the narratives of enslaved people to the bold voices of the Black Arts movement, our literature has been a mirror of pain, a map of how to navigate the challenges that we face. and a megaphone of our power."
"People don't tend to just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, with no one receiving it. I mean, sometimes they do, but you know, they're obnoxious. They don't get invited back to the party." - Pearl Cleage The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years by …
Continue reading "Discovering Pearl Cleage Through The Nacirema Society"
"Papyrus came out of a conscious community trying to transform themselves with the new knowledge of history and culture that has been hidden, or discredited, or just plain old missing from our experience here in the United States. We wanted to make sure our children had the knowledge of where we come from, and our …
"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"
"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 …
“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 …
"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 …
"The family itself is a tribe of people who are committed, who've taken the name out of a loyalty, out of faith, out of unity. And they are all coming together as a family... Just because we're not all blood doesn't make us any less of a family." Santi Elijah Holley “An Amerikan Family is a …
Continue reading "Santi Elijah Holley, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created"
"I think that you'll have taught our history as our armor, that Black people are more than the sum of our traumas or tragedies. That Black history is the way, and a path to look back. I think that we will remember how to be good to each other and how to speak well of …
Continue reading "Charlayne Hunter-Gault, My People – Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives"