Celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American artist Langston Hughes is one of the few American writers who consistently wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, and My America explores how his work speaks to the political anxieties and crises we face today. Randal M. Jelks deftly examines the themes in Hughes’s work, including creative expression, communal dignity, class struggle, and human suffering, and what they mean for our inner well-being as democratic persons and political participants.

With care and no-holds-barred insight, My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy (Broadleaf Books, 2026) removes the veneer of respectability often placed on Hughes’s work and life to reveal his political adeptness. In a world threatened by fascism, Hughes’s writing wasn’t afforded the luxury of subtlety. He made a spiritual and political decision to stand on the side of the oppressed. He believed art should be practiced for the sake of justice. And democracy can be practiced with joy.

Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks is an award-winning author, documentary film producer, and professor. He is the author of four books. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, blogs, journals, and periodicals. You can learn more about him and his work at his website.

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On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers (Random House, 2026), Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love. This is a conversation not to be missed.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB! Magazine, and many others. You can find Rachel on Instagram.

Learn more about the Torch 20th Anniversary celebration here.

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As we approach the 50th anniversaries of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots (1976) and its landmark television adaptation (1977), journalist and storyteller Lucas L. Johnson II reflects on the enduring legacy of Haley’s work through the voices of those it continues to move, including scholars, artists, genealogists, students, and original cast members like LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen.

With vivid personal anecdotes, emotional tributes, and probing reflections, Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World (Broadleaf Books, 2026)shows how Haley’s vision gave birth to a genealogy movement, inspired generations to reclaim their identities, and challenged America to confront its past. From a sixth-grader who became the first lawyer in her family, to a blind musician empowered by his father’s retelling of Roots’ most iconic scene, Johnson traces the ripple effects of Haley’s griot storytelling across time and culture.

As debates rage over which histories get told, Remembering Roots boldly asserts the necessity to remember and retell our stories. A call to action, this book reaffirms that storytelling is not just an art — it’s a path to healing. A companion reading and viewing guide to the book and film is available here.

Lucas L. Johnson II is a former reporter for the Associated Press, where he worked for more than twenty years mainly covering politics, education, and religion. He is the author of Finding the Good and coauthor of Youth Change Agent. Lucas works in higher education and has taught high school and college students. A freelance writer and communications strategist, Lucas lives in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find him at his website.

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While Lexington and Concord claim significance as the sites of the American Revolution’s opening battles, New York City’s geography, population density, and cultural status made it one of the most important theaters of the war. Between 1776 and 1777, numerous battles were fought for control over the Port of New York, including the Battles of Harlem Heights, Pell’s Point, White Plains, Fort Washington, and the largest battle of the entire revolution, the Battle of Long Island/Brooklyn. Recognizing the strategic importance of New York, and forewarned by his experience at the Battle of Bunker Hill in Boston, Lieutenant-General Sir William Howe and royal governor Lord George Germain recruited Hessian mercenaries and soldiers from across the empire to defend the city from an eventual patriot campaign to claim New York. In 1776, George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, began preparations for what we know today as the New York and New Jersey Campaign. Though the campaign failed to fortify New York from Sir William Howe, which remained in British control until the end of the war in 1783, the revolution might have ended altogether on Staten Island when William and his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, entered peace negotiations with the Americans. In a September 11, 1776, meeting, the Howes met with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Rutledge for an unsuccessful three-hour negotiation. Four days later, Howe, as Commander-in-Chief of British Land Forces in America, landed 12,000 troops in lower Manhattan and quickly claimed the city. Though the British took control of New York Harbor and the surrounding agricultural areas, the areas around New York and New Jersey remained active battlegrounds for the rest of the revolution. When the war ended, it saw some of the last British soldiers evacuate the new United States, including thousands of free and formerly enslaved Africans who had served the empire in the war, documented by The Book of Negroes.

Battle in the Margins is a special project of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation in collaboration with Black Gotham Experience, an organization devoted to African Diasporic storytelling, to commemorate the African Diaspora’s impact on the American Revolution. Those listening to this episode in real time in the New York City area can reserve a ticket to the September 19, 2026 Battle in the Margins “Main Event,” a series of original ten-minute plays centering the African Diaspora’s experience, resistance, and role in shaping early American history, shining a light on stories often left out of the nation’s founding narrative. The Battle in the Margins Research Brief is available here.

Kamau Ware is a multidisciplinary artist, historian, and walker. Kamau was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he founded an artist collective called BridgeSpotters in 1996 that took inspiration from the many bridges in the city as analogous to many disciplines making a creative project. Ware moved to New York City in 2006 and applied his work as an artist and curator to develop a unique approach to visual storytelling, coined StoryStyle that softens the threshold between artist and audience. After establishing his visual storytelling lab, Kamau Studios in 2008, he began working on what would become the Studios flagship project – the Black Gotham Experience (BGX). BGX launched the summer of 2010 as a series of walking tours and has expanded to a series of immersive experiences celebrating the impact of the African Diaspora on New York City.

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In 2021, the NAACP Image Award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers made her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a magisterial epic of African American historical fiction—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—chronicling the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War, to our own tumultuous era.

Five years, and numerous awards and best-of lists later, Honorée joins the podcast on the anniversary of the novel’s publication to talk about what it meant then, what it means now, and that call from Oprah that shifted everything.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and a student of United States history. She is the author of seven books spanning three genres, including the NAACP Image Award-winning poetry collection, The Age of Phillis. She was on the podcast on June 20, 2025 to discuss her book, Misbehaving at the Crossroad: Essays and Writing. You can find Honorée on Substack, Facebook, and Instagram.

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The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely.
In When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy (Henry Holt & Co.), award-winning plant biologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and scholar who pursues a common theme of understanding how individuals perceive, respond to, and are impacted by the environments in which they exist. Her primary laboratory-based research has been focused on the responses of photosynthetic organisms (i.e., plants and cyanobacteria) to external light cues. Additionally, Beronda pursues this theme in the context of effective mentoring and leadership of individuals, and the role of innovative leaders in supporting success. You can find her at her website.

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Moving between word and image, the call-and-response collaboration between writer Christopher R. Rogers and photographer karim brown improvises a contemporary portrait of present-day Black Philadelphia, replete with the unfinished activism present since the transnational upsurge of the George Floyd Uprising.
Arriving five years after the crucible of that period, this experimental essay-as-LP challenges us to prioritize the urgency of reckoning with our own hang-ups and half-steps and to reground ourselves within the daily, prefigurative life-work of rehearsing Black liberation. This is a hyperlocal, future-forward recommitment to ongoing principled struggle and a hopeful model of contemporary self-criticism.
Taking its title from a song by the late, beloved Uptown Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock, My City Need Something (Common Notions, 2026) challenges readers to strive for clarity in a time of Black suffering, in a city resplendent with Black joy.

Christopher R. Rogers, PhD is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He is a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He previously published with Common Notions as Lead Editor for How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising (2022) alongside novelist Fajr Muhammad. You can find Chris on Instagram @justmaybechris.

After listening to this episode, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack, where Chris and Sullivan talk further about community education and activism.

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For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

Blair L.M. Kelley, Ph.D. is a renowned author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is the seventh president of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Blair previously held senior leadership roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South and at North Carolina State University where she served as Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships and the Alumni Graduate Professor of History. You can find her on all social platforms @profblmkelley.

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