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.
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"While I have the Great Book in my home—I am a Black woman of a certain age—I reach for Toni, Gloria, Cooper, and Tina far more often than I do Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In I Know What The Red Clay Looks Like, Rebecca Carroll treats these Black women writers as a canonical text of elegiastic importance. In their own words and through their words, these pages offer comfort, guidance, and tradition."
—Tressie McMillan Cottom, bestselling author of THICK and other essays
"Thirty years ago, Rebecca Carroll curated an astonishing collection of voices, and it is a gift to now be immersed in a lively dialogue between those remarkable trailblazers and a new generation of Black women who have been shaped by their words, wisdom and radical vision."
—Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
"What a tremendous gift to have this book reborn: the writers on the writers on the stories of the stories, the stunning loop of history and future, of poetry and prose that shape our notions of humanity and identity, of love and place. I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like is an education and a pleasure, an explosive moment of literary recognition and power, a reminder of the past and a promise made of words, pointing a way forward.
—Rebecca Traister, journalist and author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
"Rebecca Carroll has assembled a scintillating group of writers who are as adept at mining tradition as they are insisting on new patterns and practices of radical thought. Red Clay hovers over the ground made by Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Morrison and Margaret Walker, and when necessary, the authors challenge motions and literary inertia we'd never seen challenged before. Red Clay is the work of black women writers who heeded their lesson. And we are so lucky to experience the heeding."
—Kiese Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy: An American Memoir
“Red Clay, as a collection, shines throughout as intergenerational voices dance in conversation with the Black feminist tongue that has saved so many of our lives. The legacy within these pages is a soul kiss, filled with lyrical testaments from Pearl Cleage, Tina McElroy Ansa, and Nikki Giovanni. These literary pillars are matched with didactic, lush, and deep critiques by today’s contemporary literary luminaries, centering the Black femme experience and offering a jeweled discovery in the sovereign search for liberation."
—Mahogany L. Browne, author of Chrome Valley and I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I love