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Radical Imagination: New Voices, New Visions from San Francisco State University

How do we imagine into fictional worlds that, as Anna Deveare Smith says, evoke multiple chords? How do we employ an honest gaze on our fictional people, a gaze that allows in beauty and its opposite, the anarchic details, the true face? And…
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Secrets and Revelations, Lies and Love: Family Legacies in Fiction

Every family harbors its secrets. And eventually, those secrets always come out. What happens afterwards? Legacies are revealed, and the possibility of healing—or at least understanding—glimmers. Monica West’s Revival Season earned comparisons…
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From the Window Seat: Travel the World with Aminatta Forna

Be a passenger on one of the most thought-provoking journeys you’ll ever take, with a first-class wandering soul guiding the itinerary. Award-winning novelist Aminatta Forna (The Memory of Love; Happiness) is one of our most important and…
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Let Her Tell It: Black Women Writing on the Body and Mind

Many Black women have a complex relationship with their bodies. Historically their bodies have been racialized, hypersexualized, exoticized, abused, exploited for labor and othered. Stressors in their lives affects physical and mental health.…
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Talking Single Motherhood, Community, and Black Girl Magic with Novelist Jayne Allen

Single mothers: they’ve been stigmatized, sidelined, and called superheroes and saints—sometimes in the same breath. Novelist Jayne Allen, with Black Girls Must be Magic, gives us a portrait of single motherhood by choice that upends all…
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Shine Bright: Black Women in Pop Music

From formerly enslaved poet Phyllis Wheatley to Mahalia Jackson to Tina Turner, brilliant Black women have been instrumental—indeed, foundational—in creating one of America’s most significant cultural contributions: its pop music. One…
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Black Panthers: Inherit the Revolution

When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale first met at Oakland’s Merritt College in 1966, history was made. They formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and ended up rocking the world with a revolutionary vision whose legacy still burns…
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The Ruptures of Leaving: Women Writers on Migration

How do immigrant mothers navigate the world, and what do they leave their daughters when they go? Join City of Berkeley Civic Arts Program grantee Susie Meserve in conversation with three Northern California writers whose work focuses on matrilineal…
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Black: The Many Wonders of My World

Black is special. Black is wonderful. Black is beautiful! Oakland-based author Nancy Johnson James and Oakland illustrator Constance Moore team up for a celebration of color and identity. Listen to the book, and then try your hand at exploring…