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Writers on Writing Interview with Nafissa Thompson-Spires
March 31, 2019 at 7:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Tune In This Week
Sunday, March 31, 2019
“Writers on Writing†Radio Show
WNYE 91.5 FM
7 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Interview with Nafissa Thompson-Spires
With Dr. Brenda M. Greene, Executive Director
The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Listen at WMEC Radio, http://wmec.mec.cuny.edu
About the Program
Dr. Brenda Greene interviews Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of the collection of short stories Heads of the Colored People (Atria/37 INK, 2018). The book won the PEN Open Book Award, formerly the Beyond Margins Award. Thompson-Spires’ stories address themes related to race, grief, mental illness, eating disorders, and police violence. Although they are often dark, they capture issues that people are reluctant to discuss and examine the interior lives of their characters. Greene and Thompson-Spires discuss the themes in the collection, the writing process and Thompson-Spires’ motivation for developing the stories.
About the Author
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Story Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, East Bay Review, and other publications. She currently works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at UIUC and is an alumna of Callaloo, Tin House, and a 2017 Stanley Elkin Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
