Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. Her debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University, and he is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Kiese’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won numerous awards and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by Kiese himself, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is at work on the books, Good, God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their own terms, in their own communities. And in 2022, Kiese was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
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Readers,
I couldn’t have been more thrilled when I heard from my former Longreads colleague,
, that the wonderful Ursa Story Podcast was branching out with Reckon True Stories, a new podcast about nonfiction writing. Even better, it’s hosted by two of my favorite contemporary authors, and .The new podcast is being produced via a partnership between Ursa and Reckon News, “an award-winning national news organization that covers the people powering change, the challenges shaping our time, and what it means for all of us.”
Guests for Season One include writers Roxane Gay, Imani Perry, Alexander Chee, Minda Honey, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Samantha Irby.
I got to talk with Kiese and Deesha a couple of weeks before the podcast’s July 9th launch. We talked about the new podcast, what memoir and essays can do, and also…just said a lot of nice things to each other about our work! (I love a mutual admiration society.)
Give it a listen…and then give Reckon True Stories a listen, where ever you tune into podcasts. You won’t be sorry.
- Sari
P.S. In the first episode of Reckon True Stories, Deesha mentions an essay by that I published in April, 2023 in my other magazine, Oldster, called “Feral.” (Thank you, Deesha. 🙏) She cites this paragraph from the essay has having a powerful impact on her:
From the AM radio on my bedroom dresser I heard Helen Reddy’s strong voice sing, “I am woman hear me roar.” I danced through aspen groves pretending to be Marlo Thomas from That Girl, making it alone in the Big City. In my treehouse, I’d light up another Virginia Slims cigarette stolen from a baby-sitting job - You’ve come a long way, baby. – and dream of my life as an independent woman.
Like any feral thing, I was unprepared for the cruelty of men.
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