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 …
”The devil said, I'm not evil. Not really. How could I be? Ain't nothing in me God ain't put there. Ain't a thing in my heart God didn't smile upon. All I want is to get back home.”Rickey Fayne -The Devil Three Times An audacious debut spanning eight generations of a Black family in West …
Continue reading "Rickey Fayne’s The Devil Three Times: A Tale of Redemption"
"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"
"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"
"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"
“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 …
"To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way." June Jordan In this episode, Lissa talks with writer Sherrie Fernandez-Williams about her latest work, Goddess of the Whole Self (In Line Press 2023), her inspirations, and her origin story. The Remembrance …
Continue reading "Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, Goddess of the Whole Self"
"My mind ain't sprightly like it used to be and heaps of things what went on when I was young, I forget and heaps of them what I want to forget, I can't." Calline Brown from the WPA ex-slave narratives, Coahoma County, MS in the collection of Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African American Literature and Life …