This special performance of Voices of a People’s History centers the voice and vision of Black women writers.

The event features musical and spoken word performances by Black female artists and readings from and inspired by the Black women writers featured in the acclaimed book I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, edited by Rebecca Carroll, now available in a revised, expanded edition from Haymarket Books.

Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers.

The first edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published in 1994, remains an essential text for readers of Black feminist literature in all genres. Featuring interviews with and excerpts by writers like Rita Dove, Pearl Cleage, Nikki Giovanni, J California Cooper, June Jordan, and others, this indispensable work speaks to the intersections of politics and art-making along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Now, writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll presents the original conversations alongside personalized introductions by some of the brightest voices in today’s literary world, including J Wortham, Safiya Sinclair, Keah Brown, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. 

This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker and a foreword by Salamishah Tillet. 

I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is a book unbound by time, lifting up a chorus of past and present voices. Paying homage to a historic lineage of Black feminist writers and their impact on our current literary landscape, it is a book by and for the storytellers, the poets, the playwrights, the dreamers, and all readers interested in what it means to make art within and from marginalized spaces.

“In I Know What The Red Clay Looks Like, Rebecca Carroll treats these Black women writers as a canonical text of elegiastic importance. In their own words and through their words, these pages offer comfort, guidance, and tradition,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Narrated by Rebecca Carroll and Haley Pessin. Cast to be announced.

Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and podcast host. She is the creator, curator, and executive producer of In Love and Struggle, a live and audio event series that centers the lived experiences of Black women and nonbinary people through monologues, music, and humor. She is the author of several books, most recently her memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, which the New York Times called “gorgeous and powerful.”

Haley Pessin is the co-editor, with Anthony Arnove, of Voices of a People's History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance.