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This episode features our conversation with Ebony Aya, which was live-streamed on November 23, 2024. During our chat, we talked about her latest book, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness.

Ebony Aya works at Macalester College as a Program Manager for the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching. She is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Minnesota in Curriculum and Instruction, with minors in Culture and Teaching and African American and African Studies. In her work, she focuses on the experience of Black women in higher education and centering African ways of knowing. Additionally, she is the founder of the Aya Collective, a space that centers the expertise and experience of Black women in writing and is the author of published books, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness and Incomplete Stories: On Loss, Love, and Hope, and recently launched the Aya Collective’s second anthology, Finding the Voice Within’.

Imagine what can happen when the sacred texts that we have turned to for spiritual nourishment and direction are places of refuge. Imagine the possibilities of staring into these texts we have meditated on from our youth up, to see ourselves reflected within the narratives in such a way that leaves us feeling simultaneously inspired and challenged, without guilt or shame. Published in July of 2024, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness is a text that allows us to imagine, giving us space to think through what we have learned about the biblical concept of Eve and the situatedness of Black womanhood. The stories found within these pages ensure a pathway towards a deepened self-consciousness that ultimately leads to liberation.

To learn more about Ebony, her work, and to purchase her books, please visit ayamediapublishingllc.com.

To learn more about the Aya Collective, please visit ayacollectivemn.com

Find Ebony and the Aya Collective on Instagram: @ayacollectivemn
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Find Black Writers Read online: blackwritersread.com

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This episode features our conversation with Brianna Wheeler, which was live-streamed on November 16, 2024.

Brianna Wheeler covers cannabis, culture, food, film, parenting and local politics for print and web. She served as host, writer and producer of the Willamette Week news podcast, and is a frequent contributor to Portland City Cast. Her creative nonfiction work has appeared in The Nasiona, Midnight and Indigo, and has been featured in Medium’s Human Parts newsletter. Her first book, Altogether Different: A Memoir about Identity, Inheritance, and the Raid that Started the Civil War was published by Korza Books in 2023.


If you could choose between being Black and being white, what would you do?
As a child, Brianna Wheeler, the mixed-race descendant of Dangerfield Newby-first of John Brown's raiders to die at Harpers Ferry in their bid to end slavery-unconsciously chose whiteness, unaware that she had the choice at all. As an adult, following the deaths of her mother and grandmother, Brianna struggled with her own identity, convinced that her lasting legacy would be the rejection of her own Blackness.

Then, in 2020, a racial reckoning rekindled her connection to both her heritage and her grandmother's lifelong work of preserving the stories of Dangerfield and the rest of her ancestors, leading Brianna to confront both long-held family dynamics and her own place in history-from a new perspective.
A unique blend of memoir, creative nonfiction and illustration, Altogether Different untangles the complex connection between the stories we tell ourselves and the histories preserved for us.

To learn more about Brianna, please visit briannawheeler.com.

Find Brianna on Instagram: @briyonceflipy
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

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This episode features our conversation with Nathan Alexander Moore (Speculative Fiction. Poetry. Nonfiction. Critical Theory.), which was live-streamed on November 2, 2024.

Nathan Alexander Moore (she, they) is a Black nonbinary transfemme writer, cultural theorist, and educator. Currently she is the Assistant Professor of Black Trans and Queer Studies in the Department of Women & Gender Studies at University of Colorado Boulder. Her research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions, and temporality. Their previous work has been published TransNarratives: Scholarly and Creative Works on Transgender Experience, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Their fiction was a Semifinalist for the 2021 Screencraft Cinematic Book Competition, as well as shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. They were also a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry. Her debut fiction collection, THE RUPTURE FILES (2024), is available from Hajar Press.

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection, THE RUPTURE FILES, tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.

To learn more about Nathan Alexander Moore and her body of work, please visit nathanalexandermoore.com.

Find Nathan on Instagram: @sumthingmoore
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

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