Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads

Ink, Identity, and Imagination: Literature as a Catalyst for Black Determination was the plenary discussion for From Resistance to Resilience: The Evolution of African American Reading, The Givens Foundation's Annual Conference held June 3, 2025 at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Moderator: Gevonee Ford, founder of the Network for the Development of Children of African Descent Panelists: Dr. Duchess Harris, scholar, author and curator of The Duchess Harris Collection, Dr. Ebony Aya, founder of the Aya Collective, and Tish Jones, poet and Executive Director of TruArtSpeaks Enjoy additional conference recordings and highlights:

Duchess Harris, professor and author, was a presenter at From Resistance to Resilience: The Evolution of African American Reading,  The Givens Foundation for African American Literature's annual conference,  held on June 3, 2025 at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. In this engaging workshop, Dr. Harris addresses The Unwritten Curriculum: How Erasure in Literature Fuels Inequity, as she talks about her trajectory as an author, and the banning of her books. Visit BlackMarketReads.com to hear from conference Keynote Dr. Luke Wood, President of Sacramento State University and creator of the first Black Honors College.  

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

In this episode Lissa talks with author Rickey Fayne about deep philosophical questions inspired by his latest novel The Devil Three Times (Hachette Book Group, May 2025). Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and The Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors’ experiences. This episode was recorded at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, MN. Visit www.BlackMarketReads.com   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 hea

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 episod

In this episode Lissa talks with Dr. Gail C. Christopher —a nationally recognized leader in health equity, a pioneer in integrative medicine, and the visionary architect behind the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation initiative (TRHT). Dr. Christopher has spent decades designing and leading national programs that advance racial healing, community well-being, and policy change—including her role as Senior Advisor and Vice President at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She is also the Executive Director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity. She joins us today to discuss her new book, Rx Racial Healing: A Guide to Embracing Our Humanity—a guidebook, a meditation, and a call to action all in one. For GO DEEPER information, Visit: www.BlackMarketReads.com   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. Black Market Reads is a production of the Givens Foundati

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

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 educatio

In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with poet Danez Smith about his latest work, BLUFF. Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetry's collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's

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 Haye

In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with author Sarai Johnson about her debut novel, Grown Women (Harper Collins 2024). Join us in this lively and thoughtful conversation about what it means to move on—or not move on—from trauma. What it means to ask for forgiveness, what true forgiveness means, how anger can manipulate our relationships, and what happens after the trauma and how it travels through bloodlines. Tracing four generations of remarkable black women, 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 attempt to redefine happiness and healing for themselves. Exploring how race, gender, and class can influence familial relationships, and how pain—and hope—can be handed down from mother to daughter. Black Market Reads is produced by The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature in partnership with iDream.tv.  Funding for Black Market Read

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 fo

In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with Author Dolen Perkins-Valdez about her latest book Take My Hand. As a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life, Dolen talks about her research, her passion for uplifting the authentic voice and the responsibility we have for the fallout of our good deeds. Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.  Black Market Reads is produced by The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature in partnership with iDream.tv.  Funding for Black Market Reads: On Health is provided by 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.  

In this inaugural episode of Black Market Reads: On Health, Lissa Jones introduces her series co-host Bukata Hayes, Vice President and Chief Equity Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Together they welcome their guest Linda Villarosa, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and contributor to the NYT 1619 Project. There’s an alarming saying in medical circles that Black people in the US “live sicker and die quicker.” Linda Villarosa, explores this phenomenon in her book UNDER THE SKIN: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America. Villarosa finds that erroneous beliefs about Black bodies, dating from the time of enslavement, continue to influence medical practices today. Coping with the daily stress of racism ages Black people prematurely. And racist beliefs held by doctors and other medical professionals often keep Black people from getting the care they need. Black Market Reads is produced by the Givens Foundation for African-American Literature in partnership with iDream.tv. Funding for this series is

In this episode Lissa welcomes co-host Bukata Hayes as they explore the power of storytelling and the nourishment of soulful food with author Rose McGee. ROSE MCGEE, founder of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, travels across the United States to deliver pies and nurture relationships. She was featured in the 2015 PBS documentary A Few Good Pie Places. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, her caring community pie baking and delivery gained recognition from NBC Nightly News, Ms McGee resides in Golden Valley, MiN, where she was named “Citizen of the Year”.

How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools The Unteachables 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, it explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect. Keith A. Mayes is associate professor of African American & African Studies and faculty affiliate in sociocultural studies in education at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African American Holiday Tradition. GO DEEPER www..BlackMarketReads.com

More About Seph Rodney Seph Rodney, PhD was born in Jamaica, and came of age in the Bronx, New York. He has an English degree from Long Island University, Brooklyn; a studio art MFA from the University of California, Irvine; and a PhD in museum studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. While in London, he created, produced, and hosted a radio show called The Thread. Seph Rodney, PhD, is a former senior critic and opinion editor for Hyperallergic. He has written for the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and other publications. He is featured on the podcast The American Age.  His book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit, was published by Routledge in 2019. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize. In 2022 he won the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. THANKS TO: Walker Art Center iDream.TV Platform Arts  

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off, Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance. In this episode Lissa talks with Dr. Rob Eschmann about When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (University of California Press, 2023), his book exploring racism in the digital age. Rob Eschmann is a writer, scholar, filmmaker, and educator from Chicago. He is Associate Professor of Social Work and a member of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, as well as Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winner Tracy Clark introduces readers to FALL (Thomas & Mercer), a hard-boiled, page-turning thriller featuring Chicago Police Detective Harriet Foster, a Black woman in a male-dominated department who, with a new female partner, must stop a killer targeting Chicago aldermen.

Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Explain how he’d been attracted to veterinary medicine? Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing—and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth.