Episode 94 - Pearl Cleage, The Nacirema Society
Givens Foundation | 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...
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Episode 93 - Dr. Gail C. Christopher, Rx for Racial Healing: A Guide to Embracing Our Humanity
Givens Foundation | 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...
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Episode 92 - Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, Mirror Me
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
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...
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Episode 90 - Sarah LaBrie, No One Gets To Fall Apart: A memoir
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
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...
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Episode 89 - Danez Smith, BLUFF
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with poet Danez Smith about his latest work, BLUFF. Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new...
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Episode 88 -Taiyon J. Coleman, Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with author Taiyon J. Coleman author of Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America ( University of Minnesota Press). In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S....
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Episode 87 - Sarai Johnson, Grown Women
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with author Sarai Johnson about her debut novel, Grown Women (Harper Collins 2024). Join us in this lively and thoughtful conversation about what it means to move on—or not move on—from trauma. What it means to ask for forgiveness, what true forgiveness means, how anger can manipulate our relationships, and what happens after the trauma and how it travels through bloodlines. Tracing four generations of remarkable black women, Johnson follows the family across the decades as they grapple with motherhood and daughterhood,...
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BONUS Episode - Karen Nance: Ethel Ray, Living in the White, Gray, and Black
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
This episode of Black Market Reads was recorded before a live audience at the historic Capri Theater in North Minneapolis. Lissa talks with author Karen Felicia Nance about her latest book Ethel Ray: Living in the White, Gray and Black, the story of her grandmother's contributions to Civil Rights. Ethel Ray’s world was a white world. She was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, where her family lived a life filled with marginalization, prejudice, and racism. She experienced constant comparison to whiteness—a place that held no space for her Black Southern father, William Henry Ray, or her...
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Episode 84 -Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Take My Hand
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
In this episode Lissa and Bukata talk with Author Dolen Perkins-Valdez about her latest book Take My Hand. As a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life, Dolen talks about her research, her passion for uplifting the authentic voice and the responsibility we have for the fallout of our good deeds. Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench. Black Market Reads is produced...
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Episode 83 -Linda Villarosa, UNDER THE SKIN: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America
Givens Foundation | Black Market Reads
In this inaugural episode of Black Market Reads: On Health, Lissa Jones introduces her series co-host Bukata Hayes, Vice President and Chief Equity Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Together they welcome their guest Linda Villarosa, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and contributor to the NYT 1619 Project. There’s an alarming saying in medical circles that Black people in the US “live sicker and die quicker.” Linda Villarosa, explores this phenomenon in her book UNDER THE SKIN: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America. Villarosa finds that erroneous beliefs about Black...
info_outlineIn the season three premier, host Lissa Jones sits down with retired Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page to discuss his children's books, advocacy work, and optimism.
Justice Alan Page is widely recognized for his groundbreaking legal career, as well as for his time in the NFL. Page played for the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears before his retirement to practice law full time; he was elected to the NFL Hall of Fame. In 1992 Page became the first African American elected to Minnesota’s supreme court, where he served as an Associate Justice until his retirement from the court in 2015. Along with his wife Diane Sims Page, he founded the Page Education Foundation which provides scholarships and mentoring for students of color to help them pursue post-secondary education. Now, Page has taken on another role: Children’s book author, releasing three books--most recently Grandpa Alan's Sugar Shack--co-authored with his daughter Kamie Page and illustrated by Minnesota artist Dave Geister.
For more information about the Page Education Foundation and to purchase copies of Justice Page's books visit their website (https://www.page-ed.org)