Francesca T. Royster on Writing Courageously

Sep 12, 2018

How does music enable us to dream up a different world? What does respecting your audience look like as a writer? How can we empower young people access to tell stories that matter to them?

In episode 71 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with professor and writer Francesca T. Royster about the queer afterlives of soul music, Francesca’s powerful family histories of women forging intellectual and familial bonds in untraditional ways, and why giving young people the tools to tell their own stories in their own ways is how Francesca imagines otherwise.

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Guest: Francesca T. Royster

Francesca T. Royster is a professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on African American Literature, popular culture, Black feminisms, queer theory, Shakespeare, and early modern literature. She received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley in 1995.

She is the author of the book Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), which was awarded an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association of America’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Study of African American Literature and Culture. She is also the author of the book Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave/MacMillan in 2003).

Her scholarship has been published in the academic journals Biography, Callaloo, the Journal of Narrative Theory, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Performance Research International, and Women in Performance, among others. She has also published creative essays in Slag Glass City, Bitch magazine, the LA Review of Books, Chicago Literati, and the Windy City Times.

Francesca is currently at work on three new book projects, including a memoir called Chosen: Making Queer Family, which explores the “making a way out of no way” in queer adoption and chosen family; a scholarly book called Black Edens: Country Music and Black and Queer Listening Tactics, about African American country music performers and fans; and another book project on the “strange relationships” between Prince and Michael Jackson.

Francesca has trained and volunteered as a counselor for the Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline and the AIDS Project, and has served on the boards of several nonprofits including Women and Girls CAN, Women in the Director’s Chair, Incite Arts, and Beyond Media Education.

We chatted about

  • Francesca’s latest book Sounding Like a No-No (02:33)
  • Francesca’s journey to her voice as a writer (06:01)
  • Writerly authenticity and respecting your audience (11:13)
  • Switching between scholarship, novels, memoirs, and journalism (15:07)
  • Connections between scholarship, creative endeavors, and social justice work (22:49)
  • Imagining otherwise (25:03)

Takeaways

Francesca’s latest book Sounding Like a No-No

Sounding Like a No-No was my second book and I decided—partly motivated being past tenure—to write about the things that I cared about the most, that contributed to who I was as a queer African American woman and a feminist. In the household where I grew up, music was really key. I would listen to record albums with my dad and my mom always had the radio on. It was the soundtrack to our lives and both my mom and dad had a very extensive musical collections. So I was really thinking about not only their music and how it influenced me, but also those moments when other music that my parents didn’t know or that they didn’t listen to kind of seeped in and how they created this new space to dream up a life and a world. Sounding Like a No-No is powered by the idea that music plays a really important role in helping us create the world that we want to be in. And that comes out a lot even now when I see my nieces listening on their earphones and I wonder, “Wow, what do they see? How are they seeing the landscape differently just because they have the soundtrack that they want right now?”

Cultivating one’s voice as a writer

I definitely feel like with my writing, I’m always attempting to build more of a voice. When I began writing my dissertation, which was actually on Shakespeare and race, I was interested in trying to bring together my academic self with the rest of my life. I really wanted an academic career that let me be my full self. That was kind of hard as a graduate student and as an untenured person, but it’s become easier over time and through jumping through the hoops of tenure….I’m always trying to teach myself how to write new things. Like after finishing Sounding Like a No-No, I realized I really wanted to write a memoir. So I’m working on a memoir on the adoption of my daughter Cece and the notion of queer family across different generations in my family. And I have a novel that I’m thinking about as well. I’m just always thinking, “What are the tools that I need to tell the stories that I want to tell?” and trying not to feel bound in by discipline or by forms.

Writerly authenticity and respecting diverse audiences

In a way it’s about confidence, having the courage of my convictions as a writer, because I really think that often in scholarship we’re encouraged—we are required—to show all the breadcrumbs of our thinking and how we’re engaging with other thinkers. There’s a kind of genealogical work or even archival work that accompanies a scholarly essay and some of that does the work of demonstrating your skill and confidence. But with larger audiences there are other tools for showing confidence and some of it has to do with taking on pressing issues in a way that provides a new angle and creating a voice that feels authentic and knowledgeable but also conversational. It’s really also about creating a voice that shows respect for your audience in all of its diversity. So I really try to try to develop that.

Francesca’s in-progress memoir about queer family

In my memoir, which is called Chosen: Making Queer Family, I talk about my experience of motherhood late in life as a black queer woman living in Chicago and also as part of an interracial couple, a lesbian couple. So it’s about the ways that we somewhat intentionally try to create a different relationship to mothering, shaped by raising an African American girl in this current political moment. As I have been writing, I’ve also thought about how a lot of African American families—maybe all of them—are queer in the ways that we often have to invent new methods or take indirect routes to get what we need and to live full lives. So I thought about my great-grandmother who ran a boarding house in Chicago, in Bronzeville, in the 1930s and 1940s. She used that as a way of holding onto this land and struggled back and forth with the bank. In my mother’s own writing, she talks about the presence of people who also lived in the house who weren’t blood family. Even though my mother wouldn’t have probably described herself as queer, I think that there’s a kind of openness and flexibility, especially in terms of community and friendship, that she taught me that was part of this experience with my great-grandmother. I try to look at other moments as well in the past where I feel myself drawing from these basic aesthetics.

Imagining otherwise

I would love to have a world where everyone can be their full selves, whoever they are in terms of sexuality, race, gender, ideas, creativity, and other skill. To be able to just fully occupy public space safely, to have basic needs—you know, food, education, housing, a sense of being able to move freely—and then to just fully be themselves. Writing is for me a way of imagining that world because it’s what makes me happy—and teaching. I feel so lucky to have discovered them because I feel excited every day. And I’ve realized that for structural reasons or just access reasons or other reasons, not a lot of people live their lives content with what they’re doing. So I really would love a world where everyone was free to seek the things that made them fully happy.

More from Francesca T. Royster

Projects and people discussed

About Imagine Otherwise

Imagine Otherwise is a podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice, and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining and creating more just worlds. Check out full podcast episodes and show notes at ideasonfire.net/imagine-otherwise-podcast. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire, an academic editing and consulting agency helping progressive, interdisciplinary scholars write and publish awesome texts, enliven public conversations, and create more just worlds.

Transcript

Cathy Hannabach [00:03]: [upbeat music in background] Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise. I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach. [music fadeout]

[00:22] This is episode 71 and my guest today is Francesca T. Royster. Francesca is a professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on African American Literature, popular culture, Black feminisms, queer theory, Shakespeare, and early modern literature. She received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley in 1995.

She is the author of the book Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), which was awarded an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association of America’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Study of African American Literature and Culture. She is also the author of the book Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave/MacMillan in 2003).

Her scholarship has been published in the academic journals Biography, Callaloo, the Journal of Narrative Theory, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Performance Research International, and Women in Performance, among others.

She has also published creative essays in Slag Glass City, Bitch magazine, the LA Review of Books, Chicago Literati, and the Windy City Times.

Francesca is currently at work on three new book projects, including a memoir called Chosen: Making Queer Family, which explores the “making a way out of no way” in queer adoption and chosen family; a scholarly book called Black Edens: Country Music and Black and Queer Listening Tactics, about African American country music performers and fans; and another book project on the “strange relationships” between Prince and Michael Jackson.

[01:52] Francesca has trained and volunteered as a counselor for the Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline and the AIDS Project, and has served on the boards of several nonprofits including Women and Girls CAN, Women in the Director’s Chair, Incite Arts, and Beyond Media Education.

In our interview, Francesca and I chat about the queer afterlives of soul music, Francesca’s powerful family histories of women forging intellectual and familial bonds in untraditional ways, and why giving young people the tools to tell their own stories in their own ways is how Francesca imagines otherwise.

[To Francesca] Thank you so much for being with us today.

Francesca Royster: Thank you, Cathy. I’m really excited about this.

Cathy: So I’d like to start off by talking about your most recent book, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era. Can you give our listeners a little bit of background on what that book covers and what got you interested in that topic?

Francesca [03:00]: Sure, yeah, I’d be happy to, Cathy. So, Sounding Like a No-No was my second book and I decided—partly motivated being past tenure—to write about the things that I cared about the most, that contributed to who I was as a queer African American woman and a feminist.

In the household where I grew up, music was really key. I would listen to record albums with my dad and my mom always had the radio on. It was the soundtrack to our lives and both my mom and dad had a very extensive musical collections. So I was really thinking about not only their music and how it influenced me, but also those moments when other music that my parents didn’t know or that they didn’t listen to kind of seeped in and how they created this new space to dream up a life and a world.

[03:55] Sounding Like a No-No is powered by the idea that music plays a really important role in helping us create the world that we want to be in. And that comes out a lot even now when I see my nieces listening on their earphones and I wonder, “Wow, what do they see? How are they seeing the landscape differently just because they have the soundtrack that they want right now?”

So I look at some performers who I see as coming of age as performers at the same time that I was coming of age, including Michael Jackson, who was really my first big celebrity fan object, Grace Jones, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Parliament-Funkadelic, and I also read backwards a little bit to think about Eartha Kitt. These are all figures that I call post-soul eccentrics, or performers whose ability to impact people was created and shaped by new freedoms connected to the civil rights movement and the ways that you could take up space and the places that you could perform as an African American performer or just different, in that moment after the Civil Rights Act.

[05:06] That was also simultaneous with the changing lives of African American fans in terms of integration and other kinds of changes (and even the lost promises of integration). Underlying all of it is this idea about eccentricity, a way of being and taking up space that is strange or unreadable or definitely queer, especially in terms of taking familiar images or stereotypes and turning them on their heads, making us think differently about those stereotypes.

In this way, I’m drawing a lot on the work of José [Esteban] Muñoz, who was a queer theorist and performance studies scholar who was really thinking about what he calls disidentification, or this way of creating new possibilities from what you see missing in the world.

Cathy [06:05]: One of the things that I really love about this book (and there are many things!) is the writing style. It’s very conversational. It has a memoir feel at moments where you talk about your own relationship to these artists and what got you interested in them. I’m curious about that writing style because it’s so very different than a lot of traditional scholarship lets you be. How did you cultivate that voice?

Francesca [06:30]: Well, thank you. That’s really what I was trying to do and I really appreciate it. I definitely feel like with my writing, I’m always attempting to build more of a voice. When I began writing my dissertation, which was actually on Shakespeare and race, I was interested in trying to bring together my academic self with the rest of my life. I really wanted an academic career that let me be my full self. That was kind of hard as a graduate student and as an untenured person, but it’s become easier over time and through jumping through the hoops of tenure.

[07:25] I always had this vision that I would love to write books that my grandmother would like. My grandmother is no longer with us. In the 1920s, she was really intelligent, really excited about the world, but was mostly self-taught. I don’t think she finished high school, but she did some high school. She was a janitor for Chicago public schools and every summer when she would clean up a locker, she would do what she called liberating books. She would take books home (and socks and gym shoes) and she would distribute them to all of us. Eventually some of my sisters and my cousins got to go with her to clean and we’d also liberate things.

She was really interested in books and reading and ideas. I remember her having Gray’s Anatomy (the book) and whenever something was wrong, she would consult her books and try to figure it out. I really thought her as my intellectual inspiration, even though she didn’t go to college.

[08:15] So my vision really was to write something for her. I don’t know if I’ve accomplished it. I’m not sure if she would be that interested or if she would get it. But I did get a chance to share my first book with her [Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon] and she was just so proud. It was hard to tell if she enjoyed it, but she just seemed really excited that I had a book at all and that I had Elizabeth Taylor on the cover.

Cultivating my writing style has meant trying to read widely reading outside of academia. Pop culture scholars are already bringing their nerdy skills to things that aren’t usually thought of as academic. There are some writers who I really enjoy reading that I model myself on. I love the work of Daphne Brooks, who is an American studies scholar and a performance study scholar at Yale. She is also a professional music writer as well. To me it feels like she’s really able to talk intelligently about popular culture and talk about theory in ways that feel just very real and vital.

[09:08] I also think that teaching at De Paul [University] has helped my writing a lot because we have very intelligent, very strong students but since we’re not an Ivy League school, some of our students are learning how to become college students. They aren’t necessarily shaped in the same ways that students are who come from more elite backgrounds or go to more elite schools. So I had to learn how to get across the ideas that I wanted to in ways that were engaging and accessible. It’s affected my writing as well.

I remember once reading an interview with Octavia Butler about her career as a science fiction writer. She is also for the most part self-taught. She said that one thing that she’s done to become a better writer is to take any class that’s free that comes her way. Now there aren’t that many free classes these days, but I do take classes occasionally on creative writing at Story Studio, which is a nonacademic creative writing space with professional writers teaching.

[10:35] I’m always trying to teach myself how to write new things. Like after finishing Sounding Like a No-No, I realized I really wanted to write a memoir. So I’m working on a memoir on the adoption of my daughter Cece and the notion of queer family across different generations in my family. And I have a novel that I’m thinking about as well. I’m just always thinking, “What are the tools that I need to tell the stories that I want to tell?” and trying not to feel bound in by discipline or by forms.

Cathy [11:12]: With this more creative work or public scholarship, you do really good job of publishing in a huge variety of locations, which is actually how I originally came across your work. I’m always struck by how you weave together the intellectual with the popular or personal with the scholarly. That’s a very hard weave and you do it so elegantly and it’s really impressive. I’m curious about how you find different ways to speak to these different audiences. You mentioned a little bit about this with your students, but I’m also thinking about your public scholarship—the work you do for Bitch magazine or the LA Review of Books. Obviously the people who read that is a much larger number of people and a much more diverse group of people than the people read academic journals, let’s be honest. Do you find that conceptualizing those audiences requires you to, to do a different kind of writing?

Francesca [12:04]: Yeah, I do think that that’s true. In a way it’s about confidence, having the courage of my convictions as a writer, because I really think that often in scholarship we’re encouraged—we are required—to show all the breadcrumbs of our thinking and how we’re engaging with other thinkers. There’s a kind of genealogical work or even archival work that accompanies a scholarly essay and some of that does the work of demonstrating your skill and confidence. But with larger audiences there are other tools for showing confidence and some of it has to do with taking on pressing issues in a way that provides a new angle and creating a voice that feels authentic and knowledgeable but also conversational. It’s really also about creating a voice that shows respect for your audience in all of its diversity. So I really try to try to develop that.

[13:02] I also try to sound more like myself, to recognize myself in my writing. One thing that really helped me in feeling more confident and also finding places to publish was that I took a great seminar run by the Op-Ed Project, which was visiting De Paul and doing work with us. The aim of the project is to diversify voices on opinion pages and other places, especially with regard to women, underrepresented groups, and queer people. There, I really learned how to pitch an idea, how to write a lede, and how to keep my writing short—that’s something that is my biggest challenge. I tend to overwrite and I’m always having to edit for word counts. I learned how to say what you mean right away, but also in a fresh way.

[13:56] We also got advice in terms of pitching things locally as well as nationally. That was how I started the relationship with Bitch Media. I really encourage people to seek out that workshop or others like it that give you a chance to get engaged with public conversations about things that you care about.

For a little while I had a column with the Windy City Times, which is Chicago’s LGBTQ newspaper. It comes out every week. My column was about taking a queer eye to really anything that I thought about. So I wrote about creative crushes. I wrote about the legacy of Nelson Mandela. I think I wrote about Glee at one point. Writing for that paper was a great experience and it was really from there that that I got the opportunity to also publish with the LA Review of Books.

[14:49] I’m also trying to get into creative writing and publishing more. Part of my plan is to also go to creative writing conferences like the AWP [the Association of Writers and Writing Programs] or NonfictioNOW just to meet people and hear different voices and learn different styles.

Cathy: Can you talk about some of those creative writing projects that you’re working on, if they’re at a point where you’re willing to share?

Francesca: Well at least one I’m pretty knee deep in. In my memoir, which is called Chosen: Making Queer Family, I talk about my experience of motherhood late in life as a black queer woman living in Chicago and also as part of an interracial couple, a lesbian couple. So it’s about the ways that we somewhat intentionally try to create a different relationship to mothering, shaped by raising an African American girl in this current political moment.

[15:47] As I have been writing, I’ve also thought about how a lot of African American families—maybe all of them—are queer in the ways that we often have to invent new methods or take indirect routes to get what we need and to live full lives. So I thought about my great-grandmother who ran a boarding house in Chicago, in Bronzeville, in the 1930s and 1940s. She used that as a way of holding onto this land and struggled back and forth with the bank.

In my mother’s own writing, she talks about the presence of people who also lived in the house who weren’t blood family. Even though my mother wouldn’t have probably described herself as queer, I think that there’s a kind of openness and flexibility, especially in terms of community and friendship, that she taught me that was part of this experience with my great-grandmother. I try to look at other moments as well in the past where I feel myself drawing from these basic aesthetics.

[16:45] Also in the memoir, I’m really thinking about the ways that adoption is part of the history of loss, whether it’s the larger history of African Americans and chattel slavery and the racial dynamics that we still inherit or it economics. Economics are also part of Cece’s adoption story, as economic need comes in. Even as I experience the joy of having this life that I’m helping raise, I’m also really aware of the loss of this other family that I don’t know. And I think this awareness links me to Black people in general. So as I’m thinking about adoption and mothering, I’m also thinking about how it’s changed my relationship to my own blackness and my sense of responsibility.

[17:48] So that’s the memoir, and I hope to have it done in the next few weeks actually.

Cathy: Oh that’s awesome.

Francesca: I hope so. I mean I might be naïve; I’ve never published a memoir so we’ll see.

I also have a novel idea based on my younger self. My first job was in Pennsylvania at Penn State. I was single and for a long time the only Black person of my friends. I had a few colleagues but my circle was pretty homogenous. My experience of living in the town of State College and learning about the area was definitely shaped by my identity.

[18:43] In those years I went on a lot of exploratory drives. I really love antique stores so I would go to those and I kept finding evidence of Black lives that weren’t there anymore. It really made me think about what I know is true of a lot of places in the United States, where Black people have lived and owned property and been forced to leave. So I’m really thinking about the traces of blackness. I’m interested in that experience but through a fictionalized experience: how a character who can be lost and a social situation that’s somewhat isolating, but also how place can sometimes exacerbate that isolation but also create a sense of grounding or a sense of possibility.

Just when I started really working on the novel, Spike Lee’s film, BlacKkKlansman started to be advertised and I thought, “Wow, okay, Spike Lee and I are thinking about the same thing.” How are we as Black people in conversation with forms of whiteness that sometimes seek our own obliteration? I think that that is part of the isolation that I felt in that moment. Sometimes people of color are forced to have conversations and to create a relationship that often isn’t reciprocated. That sense of the need to reach across political and racial lines—most of us, if we’re successful, have had to do that and learn those skills. And I’m just thinking, what’s the psychic cost?

Cathy [20:00] So I know you’re also working on a project about country music, right? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Francesca: Sure, yeah. In my next scholarly product, I’m looking at African American country music fans and performers and I’m really thinking about the historically vexed relationship between African Americans and country. I’m making the argument that country music’s Black roots have been erased for very concrete reasons, despite the relationship between the Blues, country, and old-time music early in the century. The music industry as well as particular people have shaped the ways that we think about country and the sounds of country as white.

[21:04] That’s the backdrop for thinking about particular artists right now who are negotiating that history to create new sounds and music within the genre of country. So in the book I’m thinking about Valerie June, Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Amythyst Kiah, who’s an amazing performer out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the ways that there seems to be a very strong historic turn in their music. I’m trying to recover lost histories in their performances. So it’s a project that I’m really excited about and hope to have finished in the next year or so.

Cathy: Are you a musician yourself?

Francesca: I am not a very good musician, but yeah. After a childhood of piano lessons and violin and viola, I more recently as an adult took up the upright bass and learning how to play with other people.

[22:05] I’m a little rusty, but I think that it does help me in my writing about music to know some of those fundamentals and also to just have glimpses at the joy of creating music, which only happens every once in a while before I lose my beat and fail. I’m fascinated with playing music. I have some ukuleles and harmonicas and I’m trying to work on my whistling skills. I’ve always loved music. I have a terrible singing voice, but I try to stay engaged in making music, amateurishly, through whatever means I can.

Cathy: [22:47] I’m curious how you see your work in both these more creative areas as well as your scholarship and the other kind of projects you’re involved in, how you see them bringing together an interest in academia with art or creativity, and how you connect those to your commitment to social justice activism or social change.

Francesca [23:10] Oh, great. Thank you for that question. One of the exciting things about being in Chicago is that there are so many great projects happening. Soon after I moved here, I got involved in Women in the Director’s Chair and also a project called Beyond Media Education, which was about bringing the tools of filmmaking—in this case in video making—to all kinds of young people to tell their stories. In that experience I got to learn about the power of having access to multiple tools of expression for young people, for folks of color, for working-class people, for differently abled people. Those stories are so valuable.

The activism that I’ve been involved in is often around helping share tools so that people, especially young people, can talk about issues that matter to them and also to imagine new possibilities.

[24:10] Right now, my current activism is around this group that my partner Annie and I started called Girls on Fire. It was formed by members of our community and folks at our daughter’s school who noticed low self esteem in our daughters in terms of their blackness. We are really trying to think about how to create community and connection and feed their sense of self. We don’t always talk about race. Sometimes we’re talking about self defense or we’re talking about creativity. At our last meeting, we visited an artist’s studio and the grandmother of one of the other girls talked about what it’s like to be an artist just so that they have a way of imagining themselves. The theme for the activism I’ve been involved in is really around storytelling and access and trying to create a sense of openness in terms of possibilities for the future.

Cathy [25:01]: So this brings me to my last and my absolute favorite question that I get to talk with really smart people about like yourself, which is what all this adds up to for you, the big why behind why you do all the projects that you do. And that’s that version of a better world that you’re trying to make in the process of doing these kinds of projects. What kind of world are you working towards? What kind of world do you want?

Francesca [25:24]: Well, in a really fundamental sense, I would love to have a world where everyone can be their full selves, whoever they are in terms of sexuality, race, gender, ideas, creativity, and other skill. To be able to just fully occupy public space safely, to have basic needs—you know, food, education, housing, a sense of being able to move freely—and then to just fully be themselves.

Writing is for me a way of imagining that world because it’s what makes me happy—and teaching. I feel so lucky to have discovered them because I feel excited every day. And I’ve realized that for structural reasons or just access reasons or other reasons, not a lot of people live their lives content with what they’re doing. So I really would love a world where everyone was free to seek the things that made them fully happy. There are so many reasons, whether it’s hunger or policing or all these other things that keep people from fully becoming who they could be. And that’s the world I want. I mean I would also love the earth to continue [laughs]—

Cathy [26:39]: [laughs] It would be nice.

Francesca: It would be nice, yes. But that sense of fullness, whatever it means for you, I think this is my goal.

Cathy [26:45] Well thank you so much for being with us and sharing your version of imagining otherwise.

Francesca: Thank you so much, Cathy. It’s a joy.

Cathy [27:03]: [upbeat music in background] Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by Christopher Persaud, Rebecca Reynolds, Michelle Velasquez-Potts, and myself, Cathy Hannabach.

You can check out the show notes for this episode on our website at ideasonfire.net where you can also read about our fabulous guest as well as find links to the people and projects we discuss on the show. [music fadeout]

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