I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like

Join Rebecca Carroll in conversation with Donika Kelly and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein as they discuss and celebrate the newly imagined edition of I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like.

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, Barbara Neely, 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. The new contributors carry the torch of the original interviewees’ lives and words with heart, rigor, gratitude, and radical imagination, illuminating how these conversations are about more than just writing—they are about life, relationships, joy, gratitude, wellness, and self-preservation.

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.

"Thirty years ago, Rebecca Carroll curated an astonishing collection of voices, and it is a gift to now be immersed in a lively dialogue between those remarkable trailblazers and a new generation of Black women who have been shaped by their words, wisdom and radical vision."

—Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

***Please note: This discussion was recorded on January 16, 2025.***

Speakers:

Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and host of the podcasts Come Through with Rebecca Carroll: 15 conversations about race in a pivotal year for America and the award-winning Billie Was a Black Woman. Rebecca’s writing has been published widely, and her critically acclaimed memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, has been optioned by Killer Films with Rebecca attached to write and develop for episodic TV. 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. The series is a co-production with The Meteor media collective, where Rebecca serves as Editor-at-Large.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bes- tiary. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World. She cur- rently lives in Iowa City, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate pro- fessor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Disor- dered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred. Her next books, The Edge of Space-Time and The Cosmos Is a Black Aesthetic, are forthcoming from Pantheon Books and Duke University Press, respectively.