This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Skye Jackson, a New Orleans-based writer and poet who teaches at Xavier University in New Orleans. She is a poet and critic whose work explores the complex and various forms of Black life, from the social life of violence to the intimate life of embodiment and familial and romantic relationships. Along with a number of poems in journals and edited collections, she is the co-author with Santos Calavera of a faster grave (2019) and author of the collection Libre (2025). In this conversation, we explore the place of poetry in articulating the meaning of Black life, the past and future possibilities of the poetic word, and how reading, study, and contemplation settle inside creative work.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Michele Prettyman, who teaches in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her work engages across creative and analytical practices in order to examine the complexity of storytelling and African American life. Along with scholarly articles and work on cinema, she is an editorial board member at liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies and is co-founder of Daughters of Eve Media. She was also featured in the documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking. In this conversation, we discuss the place of media studies in the examination of Black life, how Black Studies sensibilities shape theory and practice, and the relationship between creative work and community.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, graduate students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Andrea J. Queeley, who teaches in the Departments of Anthropology and of African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. In addition to a number of scholarly articles in key journals and collections, she is the author of Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba (2015) and co-editor with Devyn Benson and Yesenia Fernández Selier of Gloria Rolando: Memory, Liberation, and the African Diaspora Through Cuban Film (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of Caribbean history and thinking for Black Studies, the place of cinematic work in knowledge production, and how anthropological methods expand the work of Black study.