Send us a text

This episode features our conversation with nonfiction, business, and Christian Self-Help author, LaTanya Orr, which was live-streamed on March 15, 2025.

Brand strategist, certified life coach and visual storyteller, LaTanya Orr, strategically equips entrepreneurs, corporate executives and ministry leaders with award-winning concepts that showcase their brand brilliance with intention and maximum impact. With over two decades in marketing, public relations, and design, LaTanya shapes brand identities through creative strategies and impactful design. As the author of Strike A Pose: 7 Red Carpet Strategies Every Entrepreneurial Woman Must Have, she empowers career women to excel. Her upcoming book, FoundHER, Finding Me: How a Shift in Focus Reveals Your Extraordinary, guides women to thrive at the highest levels. Regarded as an “Entrepreneurial Midwife”, LaTanya fosters disruption in women's business through her Chicago-based, women's entrepreneurial network, The FoundHERS Suite. LaTanya holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from Davenport University.

To learn more about LaTanya and her work, please visit www.thefoundherssuite.com.

During the introduction, I mentioned the name of Michelle May, the amazing creative professionals' coach that brought LaTanya and I together. Michelle has helped me to amplify my brand as a creative professional and to streamline my workflow. To learn more about her and her services, visit https://www.ammayassociates.com/coachingmichelle.

Find LaTanya on Instagram: @latanyaorr

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support the show

Send us a text

This episode features our conversation with Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which was live-streamed on March 8, 2025, the day nationally recognized as International Women’s Day. We talked about her book, Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024).

Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.

Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.

Winnter of the 2024 Best Indie Book Award in Non-Fiction: History, Politics, and Social Sciences, Black Woman on Board offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, uncovering the vital role Black women educational leaders have played in ensuring access and equity for all.

Dr. Donna J. Nicol is the Associate Dean for Personnel and Curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach (CSULB).

To learn more about Dr. Nicol and her work, please visit donnajnicol.com.

Find the book, Black Woman on Board on Instagram: @blackwomanonboard

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support the show

Send us a text

This episode features our conversation with Victoria Christopher Murray, which was live-streamed on March 1, 2025.

Victoria Christopher Murray is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian, a Good Morning America book club pick, and The First Ladies, Target’s 2023 Book of the Year, both of which she coauthored with Marie Benedict. She is a NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Literary Work for her novel Stand Your Ground, which was also a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

Our conversation centered around Victoria’s latest historical fiction novel, Harlem Rhapsody (February 4, 2025, Berkley).

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.

When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

Congratulations to Victoria and Harlem Rhapsody for being chosen as the March read for the Club Calvi Book Club! Watch Victoria's interview about this month's read.

To learn more about Victoria and her expansive body of work, please visit her website at victoriachristophermurray.com.

Special thanks to Wendy Healey of Ventfort Hall Gilded Age Mansion and Museum and Shawn Matel from Our Culture Is Beautiful (CT) for making this connection happen.

Find Victoria on Instagram: @victoriachristophermurray

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support the show