PART 1

Glory Edim is an author, editor, and now publisher who has built a beautiful, dynamic career out of making sure that everyone is reading the kinds of books that (she knows from experience) can shape you, teach you, nourish you, comfort you. She is the founder of the beloved phenomenon called Well-Read Black Girl, first an Instagram page created to champion and celebrate the works of Black female authors, now including a book club, literary festival, and publishing imprint!

Glory, thank you for talking with me about your moving and wholly original book GATHER ME: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me. We also talked about curiosity, creativity, divinity, the sacred safety of libraries, why she thanks God for Nikki Giovanni and thanks Nikki Giovanni for a new idea of God, how her intense love for literature began and flourished, and so, so much more.

GATHER ME is about finding home in the pages of strangers who felt like family, who became her teachers, who taught her resilience and confidence when her home life was less than smooth, and taught her to find her own, mighty voice. And it’s a beauty.

Find a book club guide here.

(PS This one comes in two parts, since Instagram mysteriously and abruptly quit on us!)

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The extraordinary Alua Arthur, everyone — death doula, teacher, TED talk giver, recovering attorney, and bestselling author of BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End. The technology tried to keep us apart with two false starts and some wifi issues, but we persevered!

Alua may be more responsible than anyone else in America for trying to get us comfortable with one of the last taboo subjects in our culture: our own deaths. It is her mission to get us to accept this one big, inevitable commonality, so that we can start living — authentically, joyfully, and with less fear.

BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN is part memoir, part guide for supporting people at the end of their lives, and part motivational instruction manual for life. It is sharp, beautifully written, deeply funny, lively. It is nothing short of an immense public service.

If you haven’t yet read BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN, please don’t deny yourself this life-changing book. Thank you, Alua, for a conversation I will cherish for a long time to come!

You can find a link to this and all our book club selections here!

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Jacqueline Woodson is an absolute hero of literature and humanity. What a joy and an honor to talk with her about her newest book, REMEMBER US — about two adolescents navigating the changes and dangers of a neighborhood on fire in 1970s Brooklyn.

When Freddy’s family moves to Bushwick, he quickly becomes the daily basketball partner and best friend of 12-year-old Sage. Together, they find relief on the basketball court from the constant threat of arson, displacement, and loss. And they learn about emotional safety amid the turbulence of both their age and their surroundings.

I am thrilled that REMEMBER US is the Onward Book Club’s first featured book for young readers! Though Jacqueline Woodson is a master of the genre, she of course writes for everyone: adults, children, adolescents. And she writes everything: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenplays, essays. She is endlessly creative and astonishingly prolific — the author of BROWN GIRL DREAMING, her wildly popular verse memoir about growing up Black and female in the ’60s and ’70s, RED AT THE BONE, which addresses the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, and more than forty other books!

In this conversation about REMEMBER US, Jacqueline and I also managed to touch on a few other things: the phenomenon of book banning, the gift of growing up feeling like an outsider, the resilience of young people, where stories come from and who they belong to, spirit, the freedom and power of girls in sports, how to write about the tenderness of boyhood, how characters dictate genre and form. I loved all of it.

It is no wonder that Jacqueline has won the National Book Award, the Guggenheim, the Hans Christian Andersen medal, and a MacArthur grant, among other honors. She has been both the national Young People’s Poet Laureate and the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. And she is also the founder of the Baldwin for the Arts residency program in New York State, which provides a nurturing space for artists from the global majority to create.

Thank you, Jacqueline, for your body of work, and for this nourishing and fun conversation!

If you’d like to pick up your copy at our partner bookshop, Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, you can find this and all Onward Book Club selections here: https://www.elizabethsofakronshop.com/

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When Tara Roberts learned about an extraordinary group of Black underwater archaeologists called Diving With a Purpose after seeing a photo of them in a museum, she did something that very few people would: she instinctively quit her job and trained to dive, so she could join them. And lucky for us she did, because that led to years of exploring and documenting the wrecks of ships that once carried captive Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. And THAT brought us her stunning debut book, WRITTEN IN THE WATERS: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging.

Tara — writer, editor, diver, National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence, teller of important, enduring stories about who we were and who we are as a society — THANK YOU for joining me to talk about your work and this stunning book. In helping to uncover so much brutal and neglected history (it’s estimated that as many as 1,000 slave ships sank during their voyages, of which only 20 have been discovered), Tara comes to explore her own family history and her identity as a Black woman in America. The result, WRITTEN IN THE WATERS, is like Tara herself: both fearless and vulnerable, both honest and thoughtful.

I couldn’t put it down, and I urge you to pick it up if you haven’t already — and then watch our conversation about courage, home, fragility, intuition, history, conformity, and, a personal favorite: pushing past fear to follow one’s curiosity. Thank you, Tara, for leading the way!

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An *enormous* thank you to Camille T. Dungy for joining me to talk about her glorious book SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. This extraordinary book is part memoir, part manual, part racial and cultural and environmental history, part poetry — which makes sense, because Camille is a poet!

SOIL tells the story of Camille and her family’s move to Fort Collins, Colorado, and how they came to plant a wild and diverse garden imbued with meaning, purpose, beauty — a literal labor of love — in defiance of strict Homeowners Association rules which promoted the homogeneous use of land. Like our conversation, this brilliant book reflects on plants, yes, but also family, community, race, place, and legacy.

As Camille teaches us, humans and plants are similarly adaptive, problematic, resourceful, and beautiful. I urge you to hear her recommendation that every politically engaged person should have some kind of “garden” — whether an outdoor plot or herbs on a fire escape or a houseplant — and why it’s so important to surround ourselves with the lessons and celebration that a project like hers brings. I also very much appreciate Camille’s honesty about what it takes for women, and especially mothers, to cobble together enough time for creative pursuits.

Camille, thank you for being such a deeply thoughtful and generous writer and guest!

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One of my very first Onward Book Club guests was the incomparable Jesmyn Ward — who I believe to be the greatest and most important living American author. And now I am THRILLED to announce that Jesmyn is not only our first alumna to return, but that she joined me for our first ever in-person session of the book club!

Last month I had the honor of talking with Jesmyn about her latest novel, the devastatingly beautiful LET US DESCEND, at Symphony Space in New York City, and I am still thinking about it. Jesmyn shared so much about the process of writing this powerhouse of a book — our conversation touched on grief, loyalty, magical realism, family, good/bad television, the balance between research and imagination, and so much more. What a joy, and what an honor as always to be in conversation with such a singular and substantial talent.

Thanks to Symphony Space for hosting us and for making this video available! If you haven’t yet read LET US DESCEND, I urge you to get your hands on a copy and then return here to enjoy this conversation.

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THE UNSETTLED is an unforgettable novel — in part because in Ayana Mathis’s masterful telling, its characters are unforgettable (and God knows, I will never forget Toussaint).

Ayana is of course the author of the epic THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE, and her new novel tells a likewise powerful and heartrending story. It spans generations and landscapes, from tiny Bonaparte, Alabama to turbulent Philadelphia in the 1980s, told from multiple points of view within a family wracked by historical powers outside their control. It is, simply, a masterpiece — full of humanity, heartbreak, triumphs, and pure magic.

Thank you, Ayana, for joining me for a dynamic, rich conversation about all of it — the special peculiarity of Philadelphia, motherhjessicaood and poverty, how some characters (hello, Dutchess!) just appear fully formed, and how Ayana did the rest. I mean.

If you have not yet read THE UNSETTLED, please get your hands on a copy! It is truly a book for the ages.

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Safiya Sinclair is a wonder and so is her extraordinary book HOW TO SAY BABYLON. This memoir tells the story of Safiya’s upbringing in Jamaica under the watch of a strictly Rastafarian father, and it’s about reclaiming her identity and womanhood from the wreckage of that place — with the help of space and poetry. It is deeply felt, brilliantly observed, lushly told, novelistic in style — an absolute tour de force that both broke my heart and swept me off my feet.

Jesmyn Ward called HOW TO SAY BABYLON “lit from the inside by Sinclair’s determination to learn and live freely, and to see her beloveds freed, too.” This is a story of personal triumph, but also a gorgeous and complicated homage to an upbringing marked by anger and rules, love and loyalty.

One of my very favorite books in recent memory, HOW TO SAY BABYLON so richly deserves all the praise it has received. And I will be thinking about this conversation for a long time to come. If you haven’t yet read HOW TO SAY BABYLON, wait no longer!

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Dr. Buqué is a brilliant, generous, kind person who also happens to be a psychologist, the author of the fascinating book BREAK THE CYCLE, a sound bath meditation healer, and the spearheader of a fascinating approach to healing that blends ancient, indigenous practices with a modern, scientific approach. The methods she uses to help us resolve intergenerational stress, and both “little t” and “Big T” trauma, is, to my mind, a perfect hybrid of established technique and unconventional thinking.

I hope you will listen to this conversation about carrying familial burdens, forgiveness, illness, freedom, guilt, loyalty, and more. And I hope you will also check out BREAK THE CYCLE if you want to learn about the powerful mind-body connection and how to begin healing the unseen wounds from which so many of us suffer. The methods that Dr. Buqué describes in this book embody the perfect mix of clear-eyed science, relatable stories, and my favorite — solutions! What could be better?

Thank you for bringing your wisdom, experience, and luminosity to our book club, Mariel. You are extraordinary!

And as always, I encourage you to buy your books from our partner bookshop, @elizabethsofakron. The link is in my bio (“Browse Onward Book Club selections”). Let’s do this!

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