Rahne Alexander of Johns Hopkins University Press gave me an opportunity to look back on my career through the lens of my connection to JHUP journals. Moments like this remind me that I’ve been in the profession for quite a while. Time flies!

The conversation is less than 30 minutes, but we cover so much!

Topics include: know-your-place aggression;​ my conversation with Harvey Young in ​Public Books; Ford Foundation fellows; ​Kevin Tyler; Guggenheim fellows ​Carolyn Dever and ​Martha S. Jones; ​Mitchell S. Jackson’s ​Esquire article on Shedeur Sanders & the NFL; ​Rafael Walker’s article on ​Junot Díaz in the ​Chronicle of Higher Education; the one and only Charles Rowell; James Baldwin as a performance theorist; my first book Living with Lynching; my 2020 book From Slave Cabins to the White House; my ​Broadview Press edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harriet Jacobs’s hometown of Edenton, North Carolina; the ​Los Angeles Review of Books; and the book I’ve now begun writing​. (Eek!)

Listen here, via Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts! PLEASE SHARE and let me know what you think!

2025 marks 200 years since Frances Ellen Watkins [Harper]’s birth. Commemorations of various sorts are taking place all year. As a small contribution, I made a video in tribute to her and her last novel, Iola Leroy. 

I hope you enjoy the video and find reasons to share with others!

In alignment with celebrations of various sorts, Broadview Press is offering 20% off my edition of that novel as well as my edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 

Vanderbilt University is hosting speakers to complement their Dark Testament art exhibition honoring Black women pioneers. I won’t be giving a lecture, but I will be in conversation with one of the people whose vision led to this endeavor, Dr. Claudine Taaffe.

It’s free and on Zoom, so feel free to join us! Registration HERE.

Now that NYC is a train ride away, I can go more often. I wanted to see the Schomburg’s exhibition honoring the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, but I got to do so much more. Everything was a highlight!

But one highlight I want to be sure to share: my conversation with Lurie Daniel Favors at her Sirius XM studio. She always asks questions that go to the heart of what we must struggle with if we want decency to prevail more often. Here’s a video clip.

As the year’s end approaches, I’m pausing to appreciate some of what I did with the blessing called 2024.

Just days into January, I attended the annual convention of the MLA (Modern Language Association), but that didn’t keep me from publishing in MSNBC about how unceremoniously Claudine Gay’s Harvard presidency ended. The second week of January, I gave myself the gift of attending Karen Hunter’s Healthy, Wealthy, Wise Retreat! Besides meeting Karen IRL for the first time, I met Dr. Robin Smith and countless others who radiated nothing but good energy.

By the end of January, I had lost my voice. Fortunately, I regained it in time to give Ohio Wesleyan University’s endowed Carpenter lecture in early February. OWU is my undergraduate alma mater, so I have attended that lecture many times over the years. In fact, the last time I attended was while I was a professor at OSU, and Ta-Nehisi Coates  delivered it after publishing Between the World and Me.

March was all about celebrating Harriet Jacobs! She is one of several abolitionists featured in the U.S. Postal Service’s Underground Railroad stamp series. The Harriet Jacobs Legacy Committee hosted an unveiling ceremony in early March. As I prepared to attend it, I pitched a piece about the importance of Jacobs being included in the stamp series. The very morning that we gathered at the site of one of Jacobs’s Cambridge boarding houses, my MSNBC piece went live. That same month, I made my second trip to her birthplace (Edenton, NC). This time, I got to experience it with dozens of Black women artists and scholars, brought together by Johnica Rivers and Michelle Lanier. March was also my first time appearing on KBLA Talk Radio from their Los Angeles studios! Harriet Jacobs was the main topic discussed. A few days later, I did an Incidents book event at Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena. There, I got to experience beautiful energy from #Knubians, Mary (a fabulous woman I met in 2018 at #TBGWT Live), and so many other great people!

In April, I was inducted into the American Antiquarian Society.

In May, I was featured as a Public Thinker, thanks to my extraordinary colleague Harvey Young. On May 15th, “White Mediocrity Empowers White Villainy: A Conversation with Koritha Mitchell” was published in Public Books.

In June, I maximized a trip to NYC by seeing both Lurie Daniel Favors and Karen Hunter! I was in studio for The Lurie Daniel Favors Show and then had the honor and pleasure of hanging out with Karen Hunter. As we walked through Sirius XM, we ran into all kinds of people! Then, I guest co-hosted with Karen in studio for the first time!!!

On July 1^st, my tenured position at BU began, and it was also President Melissa Gilliam’s first official day.

July was also when Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. #WinWithBlackWomen was poised to mobilize in unprecedented ways, and their example immediately inspired many other groups. To affirm those efforts, I wrote “Identity Groups Are Mobilizing for Kamala Harris. That Shows Progress” for Time magazine. The ugliness since then has been all about beating back the victory of people truly seeing each other and coming together for each other’s benefit. Please don’t miss that! It is SUCCESS that is inspiring the vitriol!

Especially given the vitriol, it is beautiful to remember that my Time piece led to the opportunity to speak with Jotaka Eaddy, the organizer of #WinWithBlackWomen’s historic Zoom call for Kamala Harris! How did that happen? I was invited to appear live with her on September 3rd on Areva Martin in Real Time. (Areva Martin’s work extends far beyond her great radio show, so look her up if you don’t know!) It was an honor to speak with them both!

Throughout the Fall 2024 semester, I took a journey by teaching Black Women & Life Writing. I felt good about what I had designed, but it proved to be even more powerful than I anticipated. I’m teaching it again this coming semester! I can’t wait to see what another group of students will help me appreciate! Fall 2024 is also when I attended my first editorial board meetings for Johns Hopkins University Press and for the legendary scholarly journal Signs. Also, a few weeks before the election, I hosted Clay Cane at BU. I wanted to expose my Boston community to him and to the ideas in his NYT bestseller The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump. He did not disappoint!

Throughout 2024, there were a couple of mainstays:

1. I served as president of the Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF). It proved to be painful in so many ways, but I stayed with it—doing everything I could. As worthwhile as I know it all is, it may simply never be enough because so much is arrayed against every effort toward decency. So many people claim the American Way involves fairness, but American culture is designed to destroy anything that resembles actual fairness.
2. Once per month, I was a guest co-host on the Karen Hunter Show on Sirius XM Channel 126. I’ve done that for more than 2 years. It’s always an honor and pleasure, but I never assume I’ll always get to do it, so only time will tell.

Overall, 2024 was like all of life: good and bad were never far from each other. I kept deliberately noticing the good so that I could feel its impact. The bad will make itself felt, no matter what. Always, there are blessings to count.

And, in the midst of it all, there are always gifts that only I can give myself. I vow to remember that so that I can be generous.

Art by Dr. Brian Herrera, 2017

Throughout this presidential campaign season, we’ve seen attacks on single women, women’s reproductive rights and on the humanity of Haitians, Puerto Ricans, and countless others. Why? Because so many Americans invest in know-your-place aggression. It’s success that they are trying to beat back. Their hostility is fueled by the victory of more people valuing other people.

In other words, the GOP, its supporters, and “progressives” who bash Democrats while having no expectation of decency from Republicans have been confirming my book’s findings. So, the University of Illinois Press has made From Slave Cabins to the White House free for November! 

Download the ebook via this link.

I remain in awe of Harriet Jacobs, so I am pleased whenever she is acknowledged. And acknowledging her feels increasingly urgent, given that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

During Women’s History Month, the U.S. Postal Service’s Underground Railroad stamp series was released. It includes Harriet Jacobs. I found out in time to write a brief essay about why this seems appropriate. I hope you’ll read and share widely! Full article on MSNBC.

Once Dr. Claudine Gay became Harvard University’s first African American and first woman president, her tumultuous experiences have led many people to mention my work. For my entire career, I have been framing violence (whether physical or discursive) as a response to success. Examples abound in our everyday lives, in ways that never make the news. So, I hope that clarity about the examples from the national stage will move “good” and “decent” people to mobilize in ways that too few currently do. I appreciate having an opportunity to offer perspective for MSNBC.

And, here’s a video on why I wrote the article to which the MSNBC article refers: https://youtu.be/yq6w_9Eugqs

As another year comes to a close, it’s important to take at least a moment to reflect.

The first week of 2023 included the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in San Franciso. One of the highlights was a roundtable with 6 brilliant scholars discussing my book From Slave Cabins to the White House. During that same conference, another roundtable gave me the opportunity to speak about my editorial work with both Iola Leroy  and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. My edition of the latter was scheduled for June 2023 release, and a few months earlier, I placed an essay in The Washington Post to highlight the fact that Harriet Jacobs became an ancestor in March 1897. That piece was just one of several ways that 2023 was a year in which I continued my commitment to public-facing work amidst the many other responsibilities I have as a scholar.

For quite some time now, I have guest co-hosted The Karen Hunter Show approximately once per month. Karen Hunter interviewed me about From Slave Cabins to the White House in July 2022, and I have appeared consistently since then. As a result, The Karen Hunter Show became a stabilizing force in 2023 while so many parts of my life were in flux. I moved from Ohio to Massachusetts in June, so every month before (and since) has been full of disruption. Everything that felt consistent was a gift, and her show has been in that category. I have gotten to talk about all kinds of thing with Karen and her non-stop stream of fascinating guests, so it meant a lot that she made time to speak with me about Harriet Jacobs and my work on Incidents. Likewise, writing about my trip to Edenton, North Carolina (Harriet Jacobs’s birthplace) for the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) was an unforgettable part of 2023. And yet, the editors weren’t finished! Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara and her team also featured my work through the LARB Book Club and the LARB Radio Hour.

I have always prioritized public-facing work, and 2023 brought formal recognition of that fact from the Women’s Media Center (WMC), which was founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem. I received a Progressive Women’s Voices IMPACT Award on October 19th. This category of award acknowledges people who were trained, at some point in their careers, by the WMC. (I applied and was admitted for the organization’s training in 2012.) The notification of this award came at the height of my feeling unmoored by the cross-country move. It was a dose of incredibly well-timed good energy, and the ceremony in New York City was absolutely unforgettable. I can’t try to type the reasons why, but I’m certainly willing to tell you about in person! (Also, a few pictures below will give a sense.)

My cross-country move was for my partner’s job, not mine, so the professional opportunities it brought for me were unexpected. I took a leave of absence from Ohio State University, where I’ve been a professor of English for 18 years, and accepted the responsibilities of a visiting professor of English at Boston University. I’m pleased with how the Fall semester went as an introduction to BU undergraduates, and I look forward to teaching BU graduate students in the Spring.

Overall, 2023 showed me how much I like stability. LOL! However, it also allowed me to make myself proud of how I navigated so much change. As I face 2024, I’m counting blessings and feeling ready!

Just a few memories…