Publishing Talks Interviews Derek Newton/Verify My Writing

Publishing Talks started as a series of conversations I had with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It was great fun discussing the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

More recently, I’ve also had conversations with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing and bookselling in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me. I have had the pleasure of speaking with visionaries and entrepreneurs, editors, publishers, and others who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues in the book business about their work.

I really enjoy these opportunities to learn about the boundless creativity that motivates so many in the book business. I was approached recently by a PR firm who wanted me to talk to edtech writer Derek Newton about a new project he has undertaken. While my first reaction was to ignore what seemed to be yet another “pitch,” when I read further about the project, my interest was piqued and I decided I should talk to Derek to find out more about his ideas.

Derek Newton has written extensively about education and technology, including contributions to the Atlantic, Washington Post, USA Today, Money Magazine and many others. He’s also a contributing writer at Forbes and founder of the new and very interesting project that we talked about in this episode, Verify My Writing.

Verify My Writing allows writers to get a verified certification that their work is real, authentic, and human. In short, this enables them to certify that their work was not created by AI. The certification can help with submissions and pitches. Verify My Writing also certifies books and articles that have already been published with a “Human-Written” hallmark. And as Derek and I discussed, there other applications for this sort of certification as well. While writers certainly have self-interest in proving to magazines and publishers that their work is original, it seems to me that publishers will also want to verify for themselves when they receive submissions that the work they are reading is wholly or at least substantially original.

Book publishers and magazines with limited editorial resources are now dealing with a tsunami of submissions, with no practical way to determine the originality of the work they are considering for publication.

Given how good some AI-assisted writing can be, and how often AI is inaccurate (or completely wrong), there’s no question that all of us as readers will also appreciate knowing whether what we are reading online is human or machine written. This sort of validation may become a requirement in the not too distant future.

I found this conversation to be stimulating and thought provoking. Derek’s Verify My Writing seems interesting, and compelling in that it comes from a writer whose work experience inspired it.  I hope you find this conversation as stimulating as I did.

Here’s the Verify My Writing website.

If you want to learn more, contact Derek directly: DNewton@VerifyMyWriting.com

 

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Helen Sheehy: Just Willa (a novel)

Just Willa (a novel)—Helen Sheehy—Cave Hollow Press—978-2-7342678-3-9—paperback—428 pages—$21.95—April 13, 2025—ebook versions available at varying lower prices

As many Writerscast listeners know, I only interview writers about books I like and enjoyed reading enough to want to share with my listeners. So every episode of this podcast does represent a certain “best of” approach to my reading, since you will never hear about the books I did not love, or could not bring myself to finish.

From among those many books I like, Helen Sheehy’s Just Willa is a special one – this is a flat out just a wonderful novel. It focuses entirely on the story of one woman and her family, Willa Hardesty, and her difficult farm life in dusty, dry Oklahoma. Her story follows seven decades of one woman’s life, a twentieth century family chronicle that focuses on the small struggles of daily life, a difficult husband, the challenges of raising children and the heartbreak that goes with a large family.

Willa is tough because her world requires her to be tough. She is the daughter of a homesteader who somehow manages to be a single mother in an era that provides almost no support, then marries a bootlegging cowboy who is never honest with her. Her seemingly “small” life is really a world that is far greater than it seems, and she lives it with indomitable strength despite all her hardships and struggles to understand who she really is.

Like most great fiction, we come to realize that this novel is entirely true.

I really enjoyed speaking with Helen about her book, her writing process, and her past work as a biographer. I think you will enjoy this conversation, and I hope it might spur you to read Just Willa yourself, and because she is a really fine writer, and this book is autobiographical fiction, perhaps you will be interested in reading her biographies as well.

Helen Sheehy grew up on farms in Oklahoma and Kansas, although she’s lived in Connecticut most of her life. She’s been a dramaturg at Hartford Stage Company and written biographies of theatre pioneers; Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne, and Eleonora Duse.

Sheehy taught theatre and English in high schools in Kansas and Connecticut, which was the basis of her first book, a textbook titled All About Theatre. She was Adjunct Professor of Theatre at Southern Connecticut State University for over twenty years. Sheehy has also taught acting and improvisation to inmates in a maximum security prison in Connecticut.

She lives in Hamden, Connecticut. Just Willa is her first novel.

“Helen Sheehy’s masterful prose immerses you in Willa Hardesty’s world with such rich detail and emotional depth that you feel the dust of the Oklahoma plains and the quiet strength it takes to hold a family together. It’s a powerful reminder that even the women who shape our lives can hold truths we only come to understand with time. This book is for anyone who has ever known their mother—or thought they did.”—Michael Sucsy, Emmy-winning writer/director of Grey Gardens

Author website.
Buy the book on Bookshop.org

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Publishing Talks Interview with Carol Fitzgerald of The Book Report Network

Publishing Talks started as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It was great fun talking with people in the book industry about the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

In the past few years, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing and bookselling in the past and into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me. I have had the pleasure of speaking with visionaries and entrepreneurs, editors, publishers and others who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues in the book business.

The Publishing Talks series of interviews enables me to talk to some really interesting people who have made an impact of all kinds on books and book publishing. Carol Fitzgerald is a good example. She started out working for Conde Nast and then moved into the book business, founding

The Book Report Network (TBRN) at the very beginning of the online universe in 1996. Bookreporter.com and ReadingGroupGuides.com are now gathering places for a large and devoted community of booklovers and TBRN is recognized as an online leader of informed, contemporary book news, reviews and author interviews. With 30 years of constant innovation, Carol has remained deeply engaged with the constantly evolving interaction of book readers, authors and publishers. She is always great to talk to and if you’re not familiar with her sites, you should check them out.

We had a great conversation about a the past, present, and imminent future of the book publishing world. I think you will enjoy this episode of Publishing Talks. Carol is knowledgeable, engaged, and in touch with so much of what matters to the future of books and publishing.

Read Carol’s most recent book reviews here. She is a dedicated reader with incisive views about the books she consumes.

Check out the Book Reporter’s video interviews with authors on YouTube. Very cool.

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Publishing Talks Interview with Lauren Woods of LitBox

Publishing Talks started as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It was great fun talking with people in the book industry about the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics. In the past few years, I’ve talked with a variety of editors, publishers and others who have been innovators and leaders in independent publishing and bookselling in the past and into the present. These conversations have been inspirational to me. I have had the pleasure of speaking with visionaries and entrepreneurs, editors, publishers and others who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with a number of friends and colleagues in the book business.

I really enjoy the opportunities to find out about the boundless creativity that motivates so many of us in the book business. When I read about Lauren Wood and her cool new project, Litbox, a book vending machine in Washington, DC, I had to reach out to her to find out more about it. Lauren’s goal was to create an innovative way to promote local readership with local authors, something that writers always feel strongly about. Even the best independent bookstores do not focus as much attention on local authors as most of us wish they would. “I want to give writers and people in this town something to feel excited about,” she says. “I wanted to bring a little bit of optimism into an otherwise bleak moment….Great literature is really about empathy and kind of deeply getting outside of your own framework and inhabiting another person’s consciousness.”

LitBox launched in May, 2025. Lauren made it work with a Kickstarter campaign that raised seed capital of $5000.

Almost everyone in the book business recognizes how challenging it is to connect books with readers in our media’s overwhelmingly saturated information deluge. Any project that can connect writers and books to readers in a personalized, area-specific way is worthy of our support. I am hopeful that Litbox will not be a one-off, and could inspire others to try out the idea. It seems to have worked successfully in England, where there are book vending machines in subway stations and many other locales.

If you’re in the DC area, look for a Litbox and try it out. It’s in the Western Market. 

And here’s a good local story about the Litbox launch on the “Inchy’s Bookworm Vending Machine” website. It looks like they are encouraging others to use their machine wherever books could be sold by machine. I hope this idea catches on!

 

 

 

 

 

Reggie Van Lee buying the first book from LitBox.

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Annalee Newitz: Automatic Noodle

Automatic Noodle – Annalee Newitz – Tordotcom – 9781250357465 – Hardcover – 176 pages – August 5, 2025 – $24.99 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Annalee Newitz is one of the best and most original science fiction writers I have read in a long time. I read their last novel, The Future of Another Timeline (it’s brilliant!) and couldn’t wait to read their next book. Automatic Noodle is simultaneously hilariously funny, sneakily political, and highly original. It’s pretty hard to resist and aside from the fact that it is a short book that leaves you wanting much more, it is one of my favorite books I have read in a long time. Newitz takes us into a future that is recognizable, and while it is as scary as any future looking book must be in our dystopian present, while positing that our future includes a bloody and destructive civil war, the book is somehow optmimistic and hopeful.

Automatic Noodle takes place in Annalee’s favorite city, San Francisco, in the near enough future that it is a recognizable place. California has fought a bloody, destructive, technologically advanced civil war to free itself from the United States. In its newfound freedom, robots have limited rights and must struggle to find their way in a new society. If that sounds eerily reminiscent of the 1870s, it’s not accidental. Annalee weaves together a set of wonderfully humane characters, all of whom are seeking to build new identities in a strange new world. It’s a wonderful story that makes you think and also feel. Great fun carrying along some really important ideas about humanity and freedom.

I really enjoyed talking to Annalee and hope you will not only enjoy our conversation, but go out and buy the book at once – then let me know if you like it as much as I do.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the nationally bestselling author of the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, as well as the novels The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the three-time Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

“This is a story—about building community despite adversity, fighting for your rights and individuality, and creating art that you want to see in the world—that I didn’t know I needed right now. And it was so much fun to read!”—Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries and Witch King

Author website.

Buy the book.

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Publishing Talks Interview with John Cheary of John Marshall Media

Publishing Talks began as a series of conversations with book industry professionals and others involved in media and technology, mostly talking about the future of publishing, books, and culture. It was great fun talking with people in the book industry about the evolution of publishing in the context of technology, culture, and economics.

During the past several years, I’ve talked with a variety of innovators and leaders in independent publishing and bookselling from the past into the present.

These conversations have been inspirational to me. I have had the pleasure of speaking with visionaries and entrepreneurs, editors, publishers, and others who have influenced and changed contemporary literature and culture. And I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with longstanding friends and colleagues in the book business.

Whether you’re involved in book publishing or just interested in how the business works, it’s well worth understanding the ins and outs of audiobooks. Some of us can remember when audiobooks existed only on cassette tapes, which required a lot of effort and doubtless kept audiobook listening to a niche audience. With the advent of higher capacity CD’s, and more easily portable listening devices (and cars with factory CD players more frequently available), audiobook sales increased, but their higher cost kept audiobook sales from becoming a significant channel for most books (and the high cost of production prevented many titles from even being made into audiobooks).

In the past decade, the advent of digital audio players and near-universal broadband has changed the audiobook market completely. Audible was and remains the leader in digital audiobook sales, but there are many other outlets for audiobooks, and the market has expanded to become a significant revenue stream for publishers and authors.

John Cheary is the founder and CEO of John Marshall Media. He graduated from Berklee College of Music. Founding his business in 1995, he has grown it to become a leading independent audio production company – perhaps the largest of its kind. He knows more than almost anyone else I can think of about audiobook production and how the audio segment of the book business has evolved.

JMM produces audiobooks for a wide range of publishers, including Penguin Random House, Harper Audio, Google, Amazon, Scholastic, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, McGraw-Hill, and many more. JMM has twenty one Studios in two countries, over 1,000 Narrators and Voice Actors, and has won five GRAMMY Awards.

It should come as no surprise that the biggest issue in audiobook publishing today is the advent of AI, seen by many as a way to replace more expensive humans with AI-generated narrators.  Naturally, John has strong opinions about this subject—and many others. I think you will agree that what he has to say about AI narrators is likely applicable to other areas of creative business where AI use is being promoted as well.

John has been a friend and sometimes colleague for many years, and I am grateful to him for allowing me to record Writerscast interviews from time to time at JMM’s studio with its outstanding equipment and recording team—including this one.

I’d be surprised if you don’t learn something from this discussion — I certainly did. Please let me know what you think of our conversation.

Here’s a link to the JMM website.

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Jeff Kisseloff: Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss

Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss – Jeff Kisseloff – 9780700638338 – Hardcover – 392 pages – University of Kansas Press – April 19th, 2025 – $34.99 -ebook versions available at lower prices

I’ve known about the Alger Hiss case since I was a kid,  growing up in the early post-McCarthy era. And in my own family we had two close relatives, both writers, who were blacklisted, and many friends of my parents had been blacklisted at some point as well. So it was a milieu that made the Hiss story living history for me well into my adulthood. Hiss never gave up publicly claiming he was innocent of the spying he had been accused of by the infamous Whittaker Chambers, and well into the early seventies, his supporters included public intellectuals who both believed him and publicized the effort to clear his name.

Jeff Kisseloff’s Rewriting Hisstory is a firsthand account of his fifty years investigating the facts of Alger Hiss’s life and travails. He started out researching the story for a college paper, then worked for Hiss and finally was able to determine the truth about the entire Hiss saga. It is truly an amazing memoir, and is never boring. Jeff uncovered troves of original material, including 150,000 pages of mostly unredacted previously unreleased FBI files he sued the FBI to get. He collected many documents from government and library collections around the country. And amazingly, Jeff acquired the typewriter known as Woodstock 230099, that the government claimed was used to type copies of State Department documents that were used as the crucial documentary evidence against Hiss.

If you are not familiar with this part of American history – Alger Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers in 1948 of being a secret Communist spy in the 1930s and the subsequent perjury trial against Hiss was a major political event in the early fifties, a key part of the effort to “prove” that communists had infiltrated the federal government during the FDR administration – which was used by right wing figures to both discredit the “liberal” Democrats and to establish the groundwork for the Cold War and an ironically authoritarian approach to keeping democracy free. Hiss was convicted but always proclaimed his innocence until his death. Historians have taken sides and up to now, no one has proved Hiss to have told the truth. Kisseloff’s incredible tenacity brings real clarity to a complicated storyline. Almost in crime novel fashion, Jeff puts together the pieces that enable him name the only people who could have framed Alger Hiss.

As the publisher accurately says “Rewriting Hisstory is a thrilling political page-turner about an accused spy that is itself a work of scholarly espionage, built on decades of painstaking research. This is an iconoclastic work that should rewrite history books.”

Jeff and I had a terrific conversation about his work and I am certain that you will enjoy hearing what he has to say here.

Buy the book from Bookshop.org (and support local bookstores)
Kisseloff’s book website here

“Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers. It was the most politically explosive trial of the twentieth century. And while many historians believe the case is settled history, now comes Jeff Kisseloff with an indictment against the conventional wisdom. Kisseloff presents meticulous evidence to portray Chambers as a serial fabulist. Die-hard believers in Hiss’s guilt will be outraged. But clearly, they have not had the last word. This book is sure to stir a hornet’s nest of controversy.”–Kai Bird, coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Jeff’s bio: Jeff Kisseloff is a former newspaper reporter and editor whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. He is also the author of five books, including Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s–An Oral History, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920 to 1961, and You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II.

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Mark van de Logt: Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras

Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras — Mark van de Logt — University of Oklahoma Press —Paperback — 9780806194905 — 384 pages — $29.95 – October 1, 2024 – ebook versions available at lower prices

During the past couple of years, I’ve read several really good books that recast the history of indigenous Americans both prior to, during, and after the invasion of North America by Europeans, first by explorers, fishermen and traders, and later by colonizers. Almost everything most of us learn about this part of the history of the Americas has been told and taught from the European perspective. Academic studies have similarly been mostly conducted by white Americans with indigenous people seen as subjects for interrogation and study by what is proposed to be a more “accurate” form of science, rather than treating indigenous people as equals, with practical knowledge, historical awareness, and actors with full credibility in the telling of their own histories and practices.

Mark van de Logt’s excellent book Between the Floods, purposely challenges the way the history of an indigenous people is studied and understood. Mark gives credence from the outset to the oral storytelling of the Arikara people, that sets forth their history in an oral tradition, which he then supplements with other forms of knowledge to expand them.

The Sahnis, or Arikara, as they are best known, were at one time a powerful independent nation, who likely migrated from the southwest hundreds of years ago, and settled in the Missouri River region in what is now mostly Nebraska (though today, the tribal lands are the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.)

The Arikaras, like their Hidatsa and Mandan neighbors on the northern plains, were both farmers and hunter-gatherers who thrived as corn growers and successful buffalo hunters. The arrival of Europeans, even hundreds of miles away from them brought pressure on their villages from other indigenous nations, notably the Lakhotas, whose larger population and more successful military forces caused displacements and relocations, and contact with Euro-Americans brought devastating diseases and other problems for the Arikara as well. Their important location on the Missouri River brought them into contact early on with French fur traders, the Spanish, and especially Americans after Lewis and Clark, often with damaging effects on their tribe.

Between the Floods creates a historical narrative of a resilient semi-sedentary people in their migration and settlement as they confront the colonialist era, endure many tribal conflicts, experience terrible diseases, and incorporate horses and metal tools into their culture. Arikara oral traditions and histories provide an entry into their past and current culture that at its core has survived intact despite so much suffering at the hands of their enemies and the conquering American society.

Mark uses information from archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology to enhance native storytelling, and the book is illustrated with Native maps and ledger art, along with historical photographs and drawings. There is no better way to understand this important tribal nation that likely is known to very few Americans today.

This is a terrific book. It’s well written, well-researched, and demonstrates throughout a deep appreciation for the Sahni people, their lifeways, history and traditions. This kind of history-telling is really important not only for the tribe but to all of us who know so little about their past and present lives. And Mark deep knowledge and broad field of study makes him a terrific interview subject.

Mark van de Logt is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University of Qatar, teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Radboud University, and is also the author of War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army (2010) and Monsters of Contact: Historical Trauma in Caddoan Oral Traditions (2018). Between the Floods was awarded the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize for best book in Ethnohistory from the American Society for Ethnohistory. His current research involves linking oral traditions to historical events. His articles appeared in the “Journal of Military History,” the “American Indian Quarterly,” the “American Indian Culture and Research Journal,” and “Wicazo Sa Review.” He is (co-)editor of the University of Nebraska Press’s “Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indian” series.

Buy the book here.

There is an interesting interview with Mark about the Arikara scouts for “The Friends of Little Bighorn” here.

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Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from The Complete Drafts

Authors Voices gives writers a platform for reading their work. It’s an honor for me to be able to present poet and literary critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading from her extraordinary long poem, Drafts, which she began in 1986 and completed in 2012.

Now the great Minneapolis-based independent literary publisher Coffee House Press is publishing The Complete Drafts for the first time in a beautiful two-volume boxed edition.

Up to now, only sections of this amazing long poem have been published, including The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Drafts. Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (2004), and Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001). Making the complete version of this long poem available is an important achievement, and thanks are due to Coffee House for their commitment to publishing important books like this one.

In the words of poet and critic Ron Silliman, “DuPlessis’s Drafts begins more with questions than answers, literally in Draft 1 chasing a bird in the bush, sensing that the right answers need to be further questions.”

I love the exploratory, wide ranging nature of the writing in this poem. It’s illuminating, surprising, and inspiring. The language and ideas are as complex and challenging as the poet’s mind.

DePlessis was a professor at Temple University for many years. She is the deserving recipient of many honors and awards. Her most recent work of nonfiction is A Long Essay on the Long Poem: Modern and Contemporary Poetics and Practices.

Praise for The Complete Drafts

“With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts–psychic, social, historical, somatic….They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.” —Nathaniel Mackey, National Book Award-winning author of Splay Anthem

“Explicitly playful and serious, generative and interpretive, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts are essential writing and reading.” —Catherine Daly, American Book Review

“Drafts claims a place for women in the American epic. It redefines the genre’s history component to include the social, family, sexuality and daily life–as the Annales School has done for historiography in general. A thrilling achievement.” —Rosmarie Waldrop, author of The Nick of Time

Blau is always engaging, whether reading her work, or talking about poetry, poetics, and ideas.

The Complete Drafts, Coffee House Press, 984 pages, 9781566897235, May 20, 2025, $70.

Buy the book from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores (and Writerscast)

Note 1: This reading was recorded in early February, 2025 when the book was scheduled to be published in April. As of this post (May 8, 2025), it is now scheduled for release May 20, 2025.

Note 2: Last week, the Trump regime cancelled or withdrew NEA’s already committed grants to arts organization, including literary presses and magazines, and more or less gutted the NEA’s staff, simultaneously deleting both NEA and NEH in its proposed Federal budget for the next fiscal year. While we do not know at this time what the eventual outcome of any legal challenges or Congressional actions will be, if you support the idea that a healthy literary community is good for democracy and culture, please support efforts to save the NEA and NEH, and make donations to the nonprofit arts and culture organizations and groups that support them.

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Nikkya Hargrove: Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found

Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found — Nikkya Hargrove — Algonquin Books — 9781643751580 — Hardcover – 240 pages — October 15, 2024 — $29.00, ebook versions available at lower prices

“The book is deeply moving and shows how one woman managed to differentiate herself from her mom, find queer love, and discover her voice. I loved it.”–Katie Couric Media, “14 Best New Books Out This Fall, According to a Bookfluencer”

I’m fortunate to live in the same mid-sized Connecticut town as Nikkya, where she has founded a much-needed independent bookstore called Obodo Serendipity. Along with her wife and kids, she is working hard to build a literary community for readers of all kinds, especially kids. Her store has  become a place where I like to hang out. Oddly, Connecticut has very few good bookstores, which seems strange for a state with a relatively well educated book reading population. But I suppose that is indicative of the state of books and also of retailing and our culture generally – people don’t seem to spend very much time in communal spaces anymore. That is one good reason to welcome and support a bookstore (and happily I note the success of a very busy tearoom and a locally owned coffee shop as well, suggesting that people really are in search of human connection in reaction to the overwhelming flattening engendered by the internet…but that is a subject for a different episode).

Nikkya is a thoroughly engaging and impressive person. Mama is a remarkably clear eyed and honest memoir about her life. It may be trite to call it uplifting, but it really is an inspiring story. Anytime I feel that things are difficult in my daily life, it is helpful to remind myself of the challenges Nikkya faced and overcame — it’s always a good restorative, and very humbling too.

Nikkya was born very prematurely to a mother whose life had been taken over by drugs, and the fact she even survived her infancy is remarkable. She was raised mostly by other family members, as her mother struggled with drug addiction and the resulting bad life choices. But Nikkya and her mom always maintained their bond. Her mother unexpectedly had another child much later in her life, and then passed away, leaving her infant son without a parent. Nikkya, by then a young adult, made the life-changing decision to take responsibility for raising her half-brother.

Mama is the story of Nikkya’s mother, but it is also the story of Nikkya becoming a mother, finding her soulmate partner, together creating a new and very personal family, with her son, and now her twin daughters. Besides being an incredibly strong, warm-hearted and loving person, Nikkya is also a strong writer who tells her story brilliantly in this book. It is impossible to read this memoir and not be deeply affected and indeed, changed by Nikkya’s life story.

As Sonya Huber says in her blurb about the book: “Hargrove offers a deep and stirring view of the impacts of addiction and the criminal justice system on Black women, offering an account of hope, heartbreak, faith, courage, joy, and the comfort and care of extended and chosen families.”

It is an honor for me to have her as a guest on this podcast, and also to be able to be her friend (and dedicated supporter of her bookstore). And if you buy her book, which I hope you will do from the link below, Bookshop.org will give Odobo Serendipity a part of the proceeds.

Nikkya graduated from Bard College and currently serves as a member of the school’s Board of Governors and chair of the alumni/ae Diversity Committee. She was a LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow, and has written about adoption, marriage, motherhood, and the prison system for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, Scary Mommy, and Shondaland. Nikkya now operates the independent bookstore, Obodo Serendipity Books and lives with her wife and three children in Stratford, Connecticut.

Nikkya’s website.

Buy Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found

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