Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Author Ashton Lattimore joins theGrio's Natasha S. Alford for theGrio Book Club to talk about RUNNER, her new novel set on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1923.
When Lena Jameson's father disappears in a mysterious shipwreck, she takes over his rum-running business to keep her family from losing their home. It's a decision that pulls her from the porches of Oak Bluffs through gangland Boston to the jazz clubs of an early Harlem Renaissance, and into the truth about who her father really was.
In this conversation, Lattimore traces the Vineyard's Black history back centuries before the summer traditions we know to the whalers, the fishermen, and the year-round families who built lives there. She digs into the real 1923 shipwreck that sparked the novel and was never solved, the criminalization of alcohol and what it meant for Black communities shut out of the legitimate economy, the questions Black women carry about the generations before them, and why a woman who moves through the world like a man gets punished for it. She also talks about her own winding path from lawyer to journalist to novelist, and what it takes to start over in a creative life.
RUNNER is available now and a Grio Book Club pick.
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Website: theGrio.com
Author Ashton Lattimore joins theGrio's Natasha S. Alford for theGrio Book Club to talk about RUNNER, her new novel set on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 1923.
When Lena Jameson's father disappears in a mysterious shipwreck, she takes over his rum-running business to keep her family from losing their home. It's a decision that pulls her from the porches of Oak Bluffs through gangland Boston to the jazz clubs of an early Harlem Renaissance, and into the truth about who her father really was.
In this conversation, Lattimore traces the Vineyard's Black history back centuries before the summer traditions we know to the whalers, the fishermen, and the year-round families who built lives there. She digs into the real 1923 shipwreck that sparked the novel and was never solved, the criminalization of alcohol and what it meant for Black communities shut out of the legitimate economy, the questions Black women carry about the generations before them, and why a woman who moves through the world like a man gets punished for it. She also talks about her own winding path from lawyer to journalist to novelist, and what it takes to start over in a creative life.
RUNNER is available now and a Grio Book Club pick.
Connect with theGrio
Subscribe: youtube.com/c/thegrio
Instagram: instagram.com/theGrio
Facebook: Facebook.com/theGrio
Twitter: Twitter.com/theGrio
Website: theGrio.com
