Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In conversation with Robin Coste Lewis, poet and Provost's Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature, USC
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow grew up in an out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where slavery’s legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders’ stories and the near-constant wash of violence. Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes powerfully about the poverty of her Mississippi childhood and the pressures it brought on men and women, revealing disadvantages that bred a certain kind of tragedy. In this conversation, two accomplished storytellers take the stage to discuss their memoirs that pay homage to the troubled past of the South with emotional honesty and moments of stark poetry.
In conversation with Robin Coste Lewis, poet and Provost's Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature, USC
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow grew up in an out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where slavery’s legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders’ stories and the near-constant wash of violence. Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes powerfully about the poverty of her Mississippi childhood and the pressures it brought on men and women, revealing disadvantages that bred a certain kind of tragedy. In this conversation, two accomplished storytellers take the stage to discuss their memoirs that pay homage to the troubled past of the South with emotional honesty and moments of stark poetry.
