Black Authors’ Panel

Sponsored by Pearson

Coordinated by Prairie Lights Books & Café

Moderator

Arnold Daniels Jr. is a former U.S. State Department Liaison. He is an Anthropologist, entrepreneur, educator and volunteer with the African American Museum of Iowa. Mr. Daniels has taught Anthropology, Criminal Justice, Cultural Geography, English, History, and Sociology at several East Coast colleges and universities. A longtime resident of Washington, D.C., he now makes his home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Panelists

ELIZA DAVID

Eliza David is the romance author of twelve self-published novels, including the six-book Cougarette series. She was born and raised on the noisy South Side of Chicago, but now works as a librarian in quiet Iowa City, one of the renowned Cities of Literature.

In addition to writing the naughty words, Eliza is a blogger as well, having served as a contributing writer for Real Moms of Eastern Iowa, The Good Men Project, and Thirty on Tap. Her last release, The Lamar St. Jon Experience, was selected for Pitch Wars mentorship in 2018 and released in 2019.  Her stories have been featured in several anthologies, including Best Women’s Erotica: Volume 4, The Sexy Librarian’s Dirty 30: Volume 3, and Cleis Press’ Erotic Teasers. Her future projects include contributing to Hack Library School & Girls, On Film – so stay tuned to the blog for those writing adventures!

When she’s not writing, working full-time as a librarian, attending grad school (UI MLIS ’23), or raising two children with her loving husband, Eliza enjoys reading throwback Jackie Collins, acting out on Twitter, and indulging in the occasional order of cheese fries.

From The Cougarette series:

After her husband of twenty years falls in love with someone else, PR exec Cecelia ‘CeeCee’ Banks is forced to reinvent her life post-divorce. Between career shakeups, raising a teenage son and the news that her ex plans to remarry soon, CeeCee is juggling her new reality with grace, laughter and a little more alcohol than usual.

CeeCee catches one of her life’s sexiest curveballs in the form of Jay Weston. A promising artist, Jay brings out a passion in CeeCee that she hasn’t felt in years. He is everything her ex wasn’t: ambitious, sensual, exciting….and twenty-five.

DONIKA KELLY

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University.

Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

The Renunciations

In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection by the award-winning poet Donika Kelly, we find the home that one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.” Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and, in adulthood, the breakdown of a marriage, Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear. With the companionship of “the oracle”— an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma.

GABRIELLE WILLIAMS

Gabrielle Williams is 35 years old and born and raised on the Southside of Chicago. She’s a mother to two—Isabella and Israel—author, personal trainer, mentor and personal chef. She always knew she wanted to be a cook since the age of 7, sitting in the kitchen watching her mom and grandma cook. She also watched cooking shows and cooked her first meal at the age of 8: some baked chicken, just like a lady on TV. She enjoys cooking for my family and others. Cooking to me means unity, because it helps bring the family together.

Sundays are for Soul Food

How it all came about is I used to enjoy going to my grandma’s house on Sunday because that when I mostly see all my family and my grandma and mom and everyone will be cooking a big dinner it was favorite day out of the week so I decided to put the recipes my grandma shared with me and also the ones I put together in a cookbook.