Thursday, March 6th at 7pm ET on Instagram live

I’m thrilled to announce that our next selection for the Onward Book Club is the extraordinary WRITTEN IN THE WATERS, by the extraordinary Tara Roberts, and I can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.

I first read about Tara Roberts last year in National Geographic — when she was the first Black female explorer to be featured on the cover — and I was immediately enthralled by her story. Tara was at a museum when she happened to see a photo of a scuba and underwater archaeology group called Diving With a Purpose, a group of divers and researchers who seek and study the wrecks of ships used during the transatlantic slave trade. Tara was so fascinated and inspired by the work of this group that she joined them.

She has spent the last six years following, diving with, and telling stories about Black scuba divers as they searched for and documented slave shipwrecks, from Mozambique to Senegal to Benin to Costa Rica, St. Croix, and beyond. At the same time, Tara was examining her own identity, and her own family’s history.

And — luckily for us — what resulted is this incredible book: WRITTEN IN THE WATERS: A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging. It is both fearless and vulnerable, beautifully written, and a stunner of a debut.

On Thursday, March 6th, Tara (who now holds the distinctive and wonderful title “Explorer in Residence” at the National Geographic Society!) will join me on Instagram live to talk about what went into the making of WRITTEN IN THE WATERS, and how she’s been changed by her inner and outer explorations in recent years.