Send us a text

This episode features our conversation with Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which was live-streamed on March 8, 2025, the day nationally recognized as International Women’s Day. We talked about her book, Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024).

Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.

Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.

Winnter of the 2024 Best Indie Book Award in Non-Fiction: History, Politics, and Social Sciences, Black Woman on Board offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, uncovering the vital role Black women educational leaders have played in ensuring access and equity for all.

Dr. Donna J. Nicol is the Associate Dean for Personnel and Curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach (CSULB).

To learn more about Dr. Nicol and her work, please visit donnajnicol.com.

Find the book, Black Woman on Board on Instagram: @blackwomanonboard

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support the show

Send us a text

This episode features our conversation with Victoria Christopher Murray, which was live-streamed on March 1, 2025.

Victoria Christopher Murray is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian, a Good Morning America book club pick, and The First Ladies, Target’s 2023 Book of the Year, both of which she coauthored with Marie Benedict. She is a NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

Our conversation centered around Victoria’s latest historical fiction novel, Harlem Rhapsody (February 4, 2025, Berkley).

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.

When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

Congratulations to Victoria and Harlem Rhapsody for being chosen as the March read for the Club Calvi Book Club! Watch Victoria's interview about this month's read.

To learn more about Victoria and her expansive body of work, please visit her website at victoriachristophermurray.com.

Special thanks to Wendy Healey of Ventfort Hall Gilded Age Mansion and Museum and Shawn Matel from Our Culture Is Beautiful (CT) for making this connection happen.

Find Victoria on Instagram: @victoriachristophermurray

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support the show

Send us a text

This episode features our conversation with Roya Marsh, which was live-streamed on February 3, 2025.

Bronx, New York native, Roya Marsh is a poet, performer, educator and activist. She is the author of dayliGht, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry and SAVINGS TIME (MCDXFSG). Roya works feverishly toward Queer liberation and dismantling white supremacy. She is the co-founder of the Bronx Poet Laureate, a PEN America Emerging Voices Mentor, Lambda Literary faculty and the awardee of the Lotos Foundation Prize for Poetry and 2024 Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Grant from Bronx Council on the Arts.

Roya’s work has been featured widely including, The Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, the Village Voice, Nylon Magazine, Huffington Post, The Root, Button Poetry, BAM, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The Apollo Theater, Lexus Verses and Flow, On One with Angela Rye, BET and The BreakBeat Poets Vol 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket 2018).

This episode’s conversation centered around her recently released poetry collection, savings time, which hit bookshelves on February 4, 2025.

The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time, wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention.

In poems flitting between breathless prose and measured lyricism, Marsh contemplates the contradictions and challenges of Black life in America, tackling everything from police brutality and urban gentrification to queer identity, presidential elections, and pop culture, all while calling for a world where self-care, especially for Black women, is not just encouraged but mandated. “no one told the Black girl,” she writes, “‘see you later’ was a prayer / begging us survive our own erasure.”

As unforgettable on the page as when recited in Marsh’s legendary spoken-word performances, the poems in savings time are focused on both revolution and self-love, at once holding society accountable for its exploitation of Black life and honoring the joy of persisting nonetheless.

Purchase your copy of savings time TODAY: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615796/savingstime/

Find Roya on Instagram: @champagnepoet

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support the show