Dionne Ford - Writer and Critic

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with writer and critic Dionne Ford. In addition to a number of pieces in popular and writerly venues, she is co-editor with Jill Strauss of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the role of study in creative writing, the place of memoir and storytelling in the study of Black life, and the intimacy and social significance of Black writing.