Black Market Reads

Recorded live at Franconia Sculpture Park, this episode of Black Market Reads brings listeners into a powerful, place-based conversation about the life, work, and legacy of artist Michael Richards. Host Lissa Jones is joined by curator Esther Callahan and book editors Alex Fialho and Melissa Levin to explore Are You Down?, Richards' monumental sculpture created during his 2000 residency at Franconia. Grounded in the physical presence of the work and shaped by reflections from Richards' own artist statement—read by his cousin and steward Dawn Dale—the conversation weaves together art, history, race, and responsibility, asking what it means to engage with and carry forward the voice of an artist whose story continues through his work. GO DEEPER visit our website at www.BlackMarketReads.com Black Market Reads is a project of The Givens Foundation for African American Literature produced in partnership with iDream.tv. Our production team for this episode includes co-producers Lissa Jones and Edie French, technical director Paul Auguston, camera/YouTube editor Angelo Gbeve, the voice Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration Ta-coumba T. Aiken.

Dr. Luke Woods was the Keynote speaker at the Givens Foundation's annual conference conference, Dr. Luke Wood returned to his alma mater, Sacramento State to become its ninth president on July 16th, 2023. A nationally renowned scholar on racial equity with a specific focus on early childhood education and community colleges. Dr. Wood has authored or co-authored 16 books and published nearly 200 articles, focusing on racial inequity in education. Dr. Woods' bold vision for the university includes 23 strategic action items, including the creation of the Nation's First Black Honors College, which welcomed its inaugural class of scholars in the fall of 2024. President Wood holds a bachelor's degree in Black history and Politics and a Master's degree in higher education leadership from Sacramento State and a master of Education in Early Childhood Education, and a doctorate in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies with a higher education concentration from Arizona State University. "From Resistance to Resilience: The Evolution of African American Reading," was an extraordinary opportunity to champion literacy, cultural equity, and social justice. Held on June 3, 2025, this event was made possible through the generous support of the Minnesota Humanities Center.

In this episode, Lissa Jones welcomes playright Pearl Cleage back to Black Market Reads as they talk about her play The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First 100 Years, playing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis April 19-May 29, 2025. SYNOPSIS Grande dames Grace Dunbar and Catherine Green prepare for the Nacirema Society's 1964 centennial cotillion — the event of the season in Montgomery, Alabama. The elegant African American debutantes include Grace's granddaughter Gracie, escorted by Catherine's grandson Bobby, and the two grandmothers hope the young couple will soon be engaged. But Gracie and Bobby have other ideas. As the young ladies prepare for their debuts, a blackmail scheme brews behind the scenes and subterfuges unfold, all under the nose of a skeptical reporter covering the ball. Featuring clever storytelling and scandalous plots, this lighthearted comedy winds its way to an ending as charming as its characters. Our production team for this episode includes co producers Lissa Jones and Edie French, technical director Paul Auguston, the voice Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting this series focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture. This is Black Market Reads.

Join Lissa and Lisa as they delve into subjects psycological and literary. Lisa Williamson Rosenberg is the author of Embers on the Wind and Mirror Me (Little A Publishing 2024). She is a former ballet dancer and psychotherapist specializing in depression, developmental trauma, and multiracial identity. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Longreads, Narratively, Mamalode, and The Common. Her fiction has been published in the Piltdown Review and in Literary Mama, where Lisa received a Pushcart nomination. A born-and-raised New Yorker and mother of two college students, Lisa now lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and dog. Mirror Me is her second novel. Synopsis: Eddie Asher arrives at Hudson Valley Psychiatric Hospital panicked that he may have murdered his brother's fiancée, Lucy, with whom he shared a profound kinship. He can't imagine doing such a terrible thing, but Eddie hasn't been himself lately. Eddie's anxiety is nothing new to Pär, the one Eddie calls his Other, who protects Eddie from truths he's too sensitive to face. Or so Pär says. Troubled by Pär's increasing sway over his life, Eddie seeks out Dr. Richard Montgomery, a specialist in dissociative identities. The psychiatrist is Eddie's best chance for piecing together the puzzle of what really happened to Lucy and to understanding his inexplicable memories of another man's life. But Montgomery's methods trigger a kaleidoscope of memories that Pär can't contain, bringing Eddie closer to an unimaginable truth about his identity.

Sarah LaBrie was in her early thirties when her mother was found on a highway outside Houston, screaming at passing cars and paranoid that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. She was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia—and in an instant, the entirety of LaBrie's childhood came into sharp focus. In her harrowing, clear-sighted, and painfully honest debut memoir, NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART (Publication Date: October 22, 2024; $27.99), LaBrie traces a year spent grappling with the enormity of her mother's diagnosis. With compassion and vulnerability, she reflects on the consequences of being raised by someone with mental illness, processes her own obsessive behavior and unhealthy ambition, and examines her fear of inheriting the disorder or passing it along to her own future children. In childhood, LaBrie's relationship with her mother is marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. She's erratic, easily angered and cruel, but also loving and protective, committed to LaBrie's education and artistry and to making huge sacrifices as a single mom so her daughter could lead a stable life. Digging into the events that led to her psychotic break, LaBrie traces the line from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can't finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal. Spanning the globe from Houston's Third Ward to Paris to New York to Los Angeles, and touching on work by James Baldwin, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART is an unflinching chronicle of one woman's attempt to forge a new future by making sense of history. A writer from Houston, Sarah LaBrie's libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and her fiction appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She now lives in Los Angeles where she has written for television shows including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor. "In 2017, I learned from my grandmother that my mother had been experiencing schizophrenic delusions for months," she explains. "We were estranged and no one told me, because no one thought it was a big deal. That same year, my best friend shared private information with the world that I wasn't ready to reveal, then 'broke up with me' when I found myself unable to talk about it with her. I was working a job I hated while my friends all seemed to be coming into their own, and my partner, the son of prominent psychology professors from Boston, had grown up with a life so different from mine I didn't think he would ever understand. I started writing the book out of loneliness. I wanted to reconstruct all these broken parts into layers as opposed to puzzle pieces. I wanted to convey that there are many different ways to understand the past and how it makes us who we are." GO DEEPER Visit www.BlackMarketReads.com

In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with author Taiyon J. Coleman author of Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America ( University of Minnesota Press). In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family—an act at once a responsibility and a privilege—bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality. Our production team for this episode includes co producers/ Lissa Jones and Edie French, co-host/Bukata Hayes, technical director/Paul Auguston, The Voice/Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration/Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting On Health focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture. Black Market Reads: On Health is a collaboration with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross' long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible. VISIT https://blackmarketreads.com/ for GO DEEPER insights.

This episode of Black Market Reads was recorded before a live audience at the historic Capri Theater in North Minneapolis. Lissa talks with author Karen Felicia Nance about her latest book Ethel Ray: Living in the White, Gray and Black, the story of her grandmother's contributions to Civil Rights. Ethel Ray's world was a white world. She was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where her family lived a life filled with marginalization, prejudice, and racism. She experienced constant comparison to whiteness—a place that held no space for her Black Southern father, William Henry Ray, or her white Swedish mother, Inga Ray. Ethel Ray: Living in the White, Gray, and Black is a biography and coming-of-age story of Ethel and of her family's life before, during, and after the horrific lynching of three young Black circus workers—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—on June 15, 1920. Learn more, visit: www.BlackMarketReads.com for GO DEEPER content Black Market Reads is produced by The Givens Foundation for African American Literature in partnership with iDream.TV. Black Market Reads is made possible through the generous support of our individual donors and the voters of Minnesota, through the Minnesota State Arts Board with support from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.