Black Market Reads

In this episode, Lissa Jones welcomes playright Pearl Cleage back to Black Market Reads as they talk about her play The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First 100 Years, playing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis April 19-May 29, 2025. SYNOPSIS Grande dames Grace Dunbar and Catherine Green prepare for the Nacirema Society’s 1964 centennial cotillion — the event of the season in Montgomery, Alabama. The elegant African American debutantes include Grace’s granddaughter Gracie, escorted by Catherine’s grandson Bobby, and the two grandmothers hope the young couple will soon be engaged. But Gracie and Bobby have other ideas. As the young ladies prepare for their debuts, a blackmail scheme brews behind the scenes and subterfuges unfold, all under the nose of a skeptical reporter covering the ball. Featuring clever storytelling and scandalous plots, this lighthearted comedy winds its way to an ending as charming as its characters.  Our production team for this episode includes co producers Lissa Jones and Edie French, technical director Paul Auguston, the voice Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting this series focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture. This is Black Market Reads.

In this episode Lissa talks with Dr. Gail C. Christopher —a nationally recognized leader in health equity, a pioneer in integrative medicine, and the visionary architect behind the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation initiative (TRHT). Dr. Christopher has spent decades designing and leading national programs that advance racial healing, community well-being, and policy change—including her role as Senior Advisor and Vice President at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She is also the Executive Director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity. She joins us today to discuss her new book, Rx Racial Healing: A Guide to Embracing Our Humanity—a guidebook, a meditation, and a call to action all in one. For GO DEEPER information, Visit: www.BlackMarketReads.com [https://www.BlackMarketReads.com]   Our production team for this episode includes co producers Lissa Jones and Edie French, technical director Paul Auguston, the voice Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration Ta-coumba T. Aiken. Black Market Reads is a production of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature produced in cooperation with iDream.tv. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting this series, focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture. This is Black Market Reads. The struggle continues.

Join Lissa and Lisa as they delve into subjects psycological and literary. Lisa Williamson Rosenberg is the author of Embers on the Wind and Mirror Me (Little A Publishing 2024). She is a former ballet dancer and psychotherapist specializing in depression, developmental trauma, and multiracial identity. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Longreads, Narratively, Mamalode, and The Common. Her fiction has been published in the Piltdown Review and in Literary Mama, where Lisa received a Pushcart nomination. A born-and-raised New Yorker and mother of two college students, Lisa now lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and dog. Mirror Me is her second novel.  Synopsis: Eddie Asher arrives at Hudson Valley Psychiatric Hospital panicked that he may have murdered his brother’s fiancée, Lucy, with whom he shared a profound kinship. He can’t imagine doing such a terrible thing, but Eddie hasn’t been himself lately. Eddie’s anxiety is nothing new to Pär, the one Eddie calls his Other, who protects Eddie from truths he’s too sensitive to face. Or so Pär says. Troubled by Pär’s increasing sway over his life, Eddie seeks out Dr. Richard Montgomery, a specialist in dissociative identities. The psychiatrist is Eddie’s best chance for piecing together the puzzle of what really happened to Lucy and to understanding his inexplicable memories of another man’s life. But Montgomery’s methods trigger a kaleidoscope of memories that Pär can’t contain, bringing Eddie closer to an unimaginable truth about his identity.

In 2021, 83.2 percent of editors in the U. S. were White and less than 5 percent of editors were Black. According to the career website, Zibia, this coincides with only 5.9 percent of published authors being Black. Today, Lissa talks with three prominent publishers in the Twin Cities who believe that Black authors deserve to collaborate with editors who understand and appreciate their work.  Our guests are Rekhet Si-Asar (In Black Ink). Anura Si-Asar (Papyrus Publishing) and Mary Tarris (Strive Publishing & Bookstore).  GO DEEPER www.BlackMarketReads.com

Sarah LaBrie was in her early thirties when her mother was found on a highway outside Houston, screaming at passing cars and paranoid that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. She was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia—and in an instant, the entirety of LaBrie’s childhood came into sharp focus. In her harrowing, clear-sighted, and painfully honest debut memoir, NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART (Publication Date: October 22, 2024; $27.99), LaBrie traces a year spent grappling with the enormity of her mother’s diagnosis. With compassion and vulnerability, she reflects on the consequences of being raised by someone with mental illness, processes her own obsessive behavior and unhealthy ambition, and examines her fear of inheriting the disorder or passing it along to her own future children.   In childhood, LaBrie’s relationship with her mother is marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. She’s erratic, easily angered and cruel, but also loving and protective, committed to LaBrie’s education and artistry and to making huge sacrifices as a single mom so her daughter could lead a stable life. Digging into the events that led to her psychotic break, LaBrie traces the line from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can’t finish but can’t abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal. Spanning the globe from Houston’s Third Ward to Paris to New York to Los Angeles, and touching on work by James Baldwin, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART is an unflinching chronicle of one woman’s attempt to forge a new future by making sense of history.     A writer from Houston, Sarah LaBrie’s libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and her fiction appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She now lives in Los Angeles where she has written for television shows including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor. “In 2017, I learned from my grandmother that my mother had been experiencing schizophrenic delusions for months,” she explains. “We were estranged and no one told me, because no one thought it was a big deal. That same year, my best friend shared private information with the world that I wasn’t ready to reveal, then ‘broke up with me’ when I found myself unable to talk about it with her. I was working a job I hated while my friends all seemed to be coming into their own, and my partner, the son of prominent psychology professors from Boston, had grown up with a life so different from mine I didn’t think he would ever understand. I started writing the book out of loneliness. I wanted to reconstruct all these broken parts into layers as opposed to puzzle pieces. I wanted to convey that there are many different ways to understand the past and how it makes us who we are.” GO DEEPER Visit www.BlackMarketReads.com