Critical Literary Consumption

Dr. Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University) talks about interdisciplinarity, citations and footnotes, geographies, curiosity, and radical storytelling through creative texts. In the conversation, we discuss her two monographs, Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle , as they connect to broader conversations about Black Studies, critical...

Jenny Qi reflects on the process of grief and how her scientific and artistic lives merged in her debut poetry collection Focal Point . Jenny, who wrote much of the book during her Ph. D. program in cancer biology, thinks about life in the lab, the language and communication of science, different disciplinary writing genres/methods, the emotional immediacy in poems, and trying to make sense o...

Poet, playwright, and oral historian Kelli Stevens Kane is the author of Hallelujah Science . Kane shares her process of writing and structuring her debut poetry collection as a time capsule, and how the themes and visions of science are imagined in experimental and numerical language, in the body, in fever dreams, and in nature. We also discussed the complementary aspirations of science and oral...

Grace M. Cho (College of Staten Island, CUNY) discusses her hybrid text Tastes Like War: A Memoir (a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction) and how her framing of memories and the geopolitical context of her mother’s life are sociological investigations. Topics discussed include the biological gaze on schizophrenia, writing to uncover unspeakable and unknowable traumas, hearing voice...

I discuss the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family and its motivations with editor Sun Yung Shin and two contributors, V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan and Roy G. Guzmán. Sun Yung was inspired by an article written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who wrote about “narrative plentitude” in response to a world of “narrative scarcity”, and how they conceived of the project...

Dr. Jelani Ince (University of Washington) shares thoughts on research and how he sees it as both a form of collaboration and a way to be held accountable, avoiding the reproduction of harm and exploitation. In the conversation, he reflects on his past research on communities and social movements, his role as a professor during this critical moment for educators in the university, what is good dat...

Dr. Victor Ray (University of Iowa) discusses his academic work and theory of racialized organizations, the connection between empirical sociology and social theory, the racial politics of citations, and the current debates on critical race theory. He ends with a nod to scholars who also write for the public, for the possibility of provoking society to reflect on itself.

Poet and journalist Khalisa Rae discusses her beautiful debut poetry collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat , which examines race and racism, temporality, geography, ancestry, spirits and ghosts, language, body, trauma, and the genre and craft of poetry. She shares that specific poems reference particular people and topics as a way for her to contend with the current social moment and to foste...

Ming-Cheau Lin is the author of the cookbook Just Add Rice: Stories and Recipes By a Taiwanese South African and memoir Yellow and Confused: Born in Taiwan, Raised in South Africa and Trying To Make Sense of It All. We discuss her two texts, with particular emphasis on displacement, relocation, and unlearning, how language and references travel, the difficulty of translating to both white communit...

Dr. Tamara K. Nopper, a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist, discusses her scholarly work, public essays, and editing of Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. In this conversation, we reflect on social media and (alternative) data in a scored society, the language of abolition and racial justice, and the possibility of imagining...

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (University of New Hampshire) discusses her experience writing her book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred and offers wonderful insights on being a theoretical physicist and Black feminist scholar. We situate her book and arguments in academia and in a broader society that reveres science despite its limitations.

Deesha Philyaw, author of the story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies , discusses the simplicity of binaries and proposes nuance as an alternative. The concept of nuance is a running theme throughout, as Deesha and I examine the growing interest of reading Black authors in the current climate, the lack of moralizing judgments in her nine stories, the interaction between the church...

Asako Serizawa, author of The Inheritors , and I talk about her approach in writing and ordering her story collection which spans multiple centuries. In the process, we situate themes of colonization and recolonization in the context of nationalism, American empire, postcolonialism, and science and technology as critical narrative building.

In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times , author and sociologist Dr. Phillipa Chong (McMaster University) asks us to consider the labor of book reviewers, when the review has changed alongside “traditional” institutions of the newspaper and print media. The question of inclusion and representation (in literature and in the actual book reviews) remains despite the new “inst...

Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins (Pomona College) and I discuss her monograph, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, and explore the ongoing binaries of exploring food as a topic of academic investigation: subject/object, personal/disciplinary; humanities/sciences, and materialism/humanism. She expresses the possibilities of new materialism in her second book, which continues to look at “...

Dr. Rosemary Deller, book review editor for London School of Economics Review of Books , and I talk about the analytical book review, its purposes, the editorial process, and the possibilities of better academic peer review. 

Dr. Ashley Barnwell (University of Melbourne) discusses her new book, Critical Affect: The Politics of Method , which I reviewed for the London School of Economics Review of Books . Extending her reflections on the academic turn to affect, we also discuss the pedagogical practice and ethics of critical reading.

I talk methods, community, and the blurring of authorial and personal selves with Kiese Laymon , author ( Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America ) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. We address Laymon's concepts of abundance and revision, and citations as capital in academic and narrative writing.