Natalie Baszile on We Are Each Other's Harvest & Making the Creative Jump

San Francisco Writers Conference Podcast

Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel, Queen Sugar, which was not only nominated for an NAACP Image Award but also made into a television series produced and directed by Ava DuVernay for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). Natalie’s new book is We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy. The book brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine Black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. Black farms had declined by as much as 98 percent by the end of the twentieth century, and it is estimated that Black farmers cultivate less than half of one percent of the country’s farmland today. Black families have lost over 1.5 million acres of land because of racism in America, and it was recently calculated that since 1910 Black families have been stripped of hundreds of billions of dollars because of lost land. Podcast host Matthew Felix and Natalie discussed in detail some of the major themes of the book, including the importance of remembering to Black farmers, the importance of the land itself, some of the primary obstacles that have been put between Blacks and land ownership, and the importance of legacy. Natalie shared about what was involved, from a craft perspective, in putting the anthology together. Matthew asked Natalie about her writing journey, including how and when she made the jump, her creative process—including the role faith plays in it—and what it was like to see her own work, Queen Sugar, transformed by someone else when it was turned into a television series. Natalie presented her Black Harvest Fund initiative, which distributes grants to certified non-profits that advance the work of Black farmers and farmers of color. We Are Each Other's Harvest is out now. Listen here or on: iTunes | Stitcher | Spotify | Google | TuneIn | Amazon | Player FM | Deezer Watch on YouTube Links https://nataliebaszile.com/ https://www.facebook.com/natalie.baszile https://twitter.com/NatalieBaszile https://www.instagram.com/nataliebaszile/