Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies.

Unable to speak up as a child, Cole talks about how she learned to find her voice amid a family of gifted talkers and storytellers. Cole describes her father and grandmother as inspirational figures who nevertheless were marked by the generational trauma experienced by so many African Americans. But from this emerges Cole’s own, unique spiritual account of the world, overseen by a God who lives in our hurting, imperfect bodies, and who sees us as we are.

Cole is one of the most lyrical, perceptive and moving writers of her generation, at once cerebral and earthly, and always rooted in the body. We talk about Cole’s hair turning grey as a child, her wise grandmother and inspirational father, and the moments when she came to realise that both of them needed her care.