I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like
Thirty years after its original publication, this newly imagined edition brings the work and musings of fifteen Black literary luminaries in conversation with a new generation of writers and readers.
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, including Donika Kelly, Safiya Sinclair, Diamond Sharp, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, among others. This new edition also includes an introductory poem by Morgan Parker, a foreword by Salamishah Tillet, and a new author’s note. 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.
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.