Writing Your Family Story, featuring Louis Chude-Sokei

The family story drives so many writers to the page—regardless of genre, and in this week’s episode we hear from a writer who has an epic family story to tell. If you have a family story you want to write, you’ll relate to Louis Chude-Sokei’s exploration of needing distance on the one hand and having a fire under him to write his story on the other. We talk about Blackness in America, writing personal story in a way that highlights its uniqueness and its universality, and so much more. This episode is a real treat for anyone interested in—or wrestling with—family story.

ABOUT LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI

Louis Chude-Sokei is a writer and scholar whose work ranges widely in and around the literary, political, and cultural phenomena of the African Diaspora. He’s the author of three books on university presses, and is out with a new memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, that traces his intellectual development across multiple nations and distinct Black cultures. Chude-Sokei is the Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, which was this year ranked by Princeton Journal reviews as the #1 journal of Black Studies in the United States.