The Black Writer's Studio

Amanda Johnston is a writer, artist, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. Born in East St. Louis, IL, and raised in Austin, TX, she began writing poetry while living in Kentucky. Her writing is published widely, and she has presented at numerous literary conferences and events.

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Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence , Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries.

She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. Her second book, Water Streetwas a finalist for the Orange Prize and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023 . She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky where she is a Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor.

Remica Bingham-Risher is a poet, interviewer and essayist, a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Her book, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up, was published by Beacon Press in September 2022. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, Callaloo, Essence and a host of other outlets. She is the author of Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and a finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives, which help faculty integrate writing into the classroom, at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, Virginia with her husband and children.

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The Hurston/Wright Foundation presents The Black Writer’s Studio, a podcast dedicated to showcasing Black Writers who are transforming the world today with their literary pen. Host Dr. Khadijah Ali-Coleman interviews novelists, poets, scholars, screenwriters and more. 

Ella Baker famously said, “Give light, and people will find the way.” And, oh, how that light is so necessary today more than ever.   

This year, the Hurston/Wright Foundation's board of directors has selected Keeangha-Yamahtta Taylor as the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Ella Baker award. The board believes that Dr. Taylor has shone her light in ways that have transformed communities, informed the general public and brilliantly advocated for equity and inclusion for the disenfranchised nationally and globally. The Ella Baker Award, named for the heroic civil rights activist, Ella Baker, recognizes writers and arts activists for exceptional work that advances social justice.

Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a scholar of anti-Black racism, public policy, radical politics and social movements. She has written three award-winning books, including Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, which was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020.   Dr. Taylor is also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. She received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2021, as well.  She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and for eight years, was professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is currently a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.  This episode was produced in celebration of the annual Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards.

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The Hurston/Wright Foundation's Madam C.J. Walker Award recognizes exceptional innovation in supporting and sustaining Black literature. Named for the feisty and entrepreneurial Madam CJ Walker, the award recognizes a person or organization that is integral to the lifeblood of Black culture.

Madam CJ Walker famously exclaimed, “My object in life is not simply to make money for myself or to spend it on myself in dressing or running around in an automobile, but I love to use a part of what I make in trying to help others.” This year’s recipient has certainly succeeded on that front. The Madam CJ Walker 2022 honoree is Ron Kavanaugh.

Ron Kavanaugh is a literary activist.  He is the founder of the Bronx-based Literary Freedom Project, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt not-for-profit arts organization that supports the literary arts through education, creative thinking, and new media. LFP believes that cultural identity is a fundamental cornerstone in the development of smart, creative, and engaged communities. Towards this goal, LFP also develops literature-based lesson plans and hosts the Mosaic Literary Conference, an annual literature-education event.  In 1998, Literary Freedom Project (LFP), launched Mosaic Literary Magazine, a print tri-annual that explores the literary arts by writers of African descent, and features interviews, essays, and book reviews.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Ron has worked with numerous arts organizations including The Bronx Museum of the Arts and En Foco, Inc. In 2017, he organized the exhibition Black Documents, which featured Jamel Shabazz plus five emerging local photographers. Kavanaugh has hosted book discussions with a wide variety of authors including Marlon James, Tayari Jones, Angie Cruz, and Nicole Dennis Benn among others. In 2021, he coordinated in collaboration with the Leonard Lief Library at Lehman College, the New York City presentation of Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters, a yearlong national public humanities initiative sponsored by the Library of America and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Recently, he was featured in the New York Times for the exhibit "Swagger and Tenderness: The South Bronx Portraits by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres." He co-curated the exhibit with Amy Rosenblum Martín for the The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

This special edition of The Black Writer's Studio podcast is hosted by Troy Johnson of AALBC.com. Troy and Ron share a unique history within the Black literary arts landscape that spans almost 30 years. 

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The Hurston/Wright Foundation presents The Black Writer’s Studio, a podcast dedicated to showcasing Black Writers who are transforming the world today with their literary pen. Host Dr. Khadijah Ali-Coleman interviews novelists, poets, scholars, screenwriters and more. 

Destiny O. Birdsong is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, African American Review, and Catapult, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published in 2020 by Tin House and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award. Her debut novel, Nobody’s Magic, was published in February 2022 from Grand Central Publishing. 

Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. In addition to her work as a teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she has taught at several universities, including Rutgers University and University of Illinois-Chicago, and at Stateville Prison via the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. She is the Inaugural Poet for the People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago. Betts serves as Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and is founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side.

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Credits:  

Hosted and produced by Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Ed.D. 

Music by Benjamin B. Dawson, Jr. 

Song "Legacy" performed by Liberated Muse, written by Khadijah Ali-Coleman  

Presented by the Hurston Wright Foundation.  

Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in 2 Bridges Review, Scalawag, Nashville Review, jubilat, Vinyl, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2020. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the chapbook Low Parish and author of The Understudy’s Handbook which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers Publishing House. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an assistant professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.

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Credits:  

Hosted and produced by Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Ed.D.

Music by Benjamin B. Dawson, Jr. 

Song "Legacy" performed by Liberated Muse, 

written by Khadijah Ali-Coleman  

Presented by the Hurston Wright Foundation.  

Amina Gautier is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. More than one hundred and thirty of her stories have been published, appearing in Agni, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, Callaloo, Cincinnati Review, Glimmer Train, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Joyland, Kenyon Review, Kweli, Latino Book Review, Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Quarterly West, Southern Review, and Triquarterly among other places. She is the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction, and the International Latino Book Award. For her body of work she has received the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Marita Golden is the author of 19 works of fiction and nonfiction. 

Her most recent work of nonfiction is The Strong Black Woman How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women. 

She is the recipient of many awards including the Writers for Writers Award presented by Barnes & Noble and Poets and Writers, an award from the Authors Guild, and the Fiction Award for her novel After awarded by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has lectured and read from her work internationally. Co-founder and President Emerita of the Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation, Marita Golden is a veteran teacher of writing. 

She taught at the University of Lagos, in Nigeria and has served as a member of the faculties of the MFA Graduate Creative Writing Programs at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University. She has served as Distinguished Writer in Residence within the MA Creative Writing Program at John Hopkins University, and Prince Georges Community College and the University of the District of Columbia. 

As a literary consultant, she offers writing workshops, coaching, and manuscript evaluation services. 

Learn more at http://www.MaritaGolden.com 

Credits: 

Hosted and produced by Khadijah Ali-Coleman, Ed.D. 

Music by Benjamin B. Dawson, Jr. 

Song "Legacy" performed by Liberated Muse, written by Khadijah Ali-Coleman 

Photos from Marita Golden and Google Presented by the Hurston Wright Foundation. 

Kymone Freeman is an artist, activist and co-founder of We Act Radio, Washington DC’s independent progressive radio and TV studio since 2011. He established the Charnice Milton Community Bookstore in 2018 and is also an award-winning playwright with several productions to his credit including “Prison Poetry”, “Whites Only, An Angry Black Man in Therapy” . He won the 2017 PRNDI Award for commentary and published articles in print with Washington Post and Ebony Magazine. He was part of international delegations to Cuba, Kenya, Ghana and Venezuela and is founder of the annual Black L.U.V. Festival in Washington, DC. Kymone joins us in the Black Writer's Studio to talk about his new book of fiction that is an Afrofuturist dystopian tale that revolves around water rights and adaptated from his earlier screenplay. 

Learn more about Kymone and his community work at:  

B. Sharise Moore’s love of literature was ignited by Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.  After earning a BA in English from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, she began performing her poetry on stages throughout the country. To date, Moore’s poems have appeared in Starline, Fantasy Magazine, These Bewitching Bonds, Mermaid Monthly, and FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.   At present, Moore is a writer/educator, curriculum designer, and the poetry editor at FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. Her debut YA novel, Dr. Marvellus Djinn’s Odd Scholars is available for purchase wherever books are sold. Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook for Middle and High School students is forthcoming in March 2022 and Fangs, Feathers, and Folklore: Africa’s Amazing Beasts (a mythological field guide focused solely on the African continent) is forthcoming from Algonquin Young Readers in 2023. B. Sharise is represented by Laurie McLean, partner agent at Fuse Literary Agency. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband and young son.