Author Jennifer Givhan joins DVBR contributor Kimberly Lau to discuss The Sleeping Sisters, a genre-blending novel of magical realism, crime, and horror inspired by New Mexico’s landscape and the unresolved West Mesa murders. Their conversation explores Indigenous and Latina ancestry, myth, motherhood, violence against women, cultural reclamation, and the power of storytelling to confront darkness while creating space for justice, resilience, and hope.

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. Givhan is the author of five full-length poetry collections and the novels River Woman, River Demon, Jubilee, Trinity Sight, and Salt Bones.

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On this episode of Diverse Voices Book Review, host Hopeton Hay speaks with Vanessa S. Williamson, author of The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History. Their wide-ranging conversation revisits the Boston Tea Party as a protest against a corporate tax break, explores taxation as a tool for Black freedom during Reconstruction, and examines how Franklin D. Roosevelt connected paying taxes with civic duty during World War II.

Vanessa Williamson is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America. She is also the author of Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes,and with Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

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In this episode of Diverse Voices Book Review, host Hopeton Hay talks with Tomas Moniz about his new novel, The King of Aloe Vera. Moniz discusses Ray, a 75-year-old widower whose unexpected friendship with a young woman named Q draws him out of grief and back into community. Set in San Francisco, the novel explores aging, identity, housing insecurity, intergenerational connection, and the challenge of addressing social issues.

Tomas Moniz is an East Oakland–based writer whose novels also include Big Familia, and All Friends Are Necessary. He also edited the Rad Dad and Rad Families anthologies and teaches creative writing.

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In this episode of Diverse Voices Book Review, host Hopeton Hay speaks with Dr. Rosalee Martin about her book Their Stories, Our Stories: Four Presidents of Huston-Tillotson University. Drawing on her 50 years as a professor at Huston-Tillotson University, Dr. Martin reflects on the leadership, struggles, resilience, and enduring importance of HBCUs. The conversation highlights the presidents she served under from 1972 to 2023, the role of faculty and alumni, the challenges of funding and accreditation, and why HBCUs remain vital institutions today.

Dr. Rosalee Martin is a sociologist, licensed social worker, educator, poet, and artist who retired from Huston-Tillotson University after five decades of teaching. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, and her creative work has appeared in several anthologies, including Experiments in the Jazz Aesthetic, Art, Activism, Academia, and The Austin Project.

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In this episode of Diverse Voices Book Review, host Hopeton Hay welcomes back Randal Maurice Jelks for a powerful conversation about My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy. Their discussion explores Hughes not only as a beloved poet of the Harlem Renaissance, but also as a deeply political writer whose essays, speeches, travels, and commitments to working-class struggle still speak urgently to questions of race, democracy, justice, and belonging today. Jelks reflects on Hughes’s global vision, his roots in Black radical traditions, his defense of the Scottsboro Boys, and his enduring insistence that America must be claimed and challenged by all of its people.

Dr. Randall Maurice Jelks is a professor, documentary producer, and award-winning author whose work examines African American history, religion, politics, and culture. His writing has appeared in publications including the Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in journals, newspapers, blogs, and other periodicals. He is also co-editor of the academic journal American Studies.

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Diverse Voices Book Review contributor Amanda Moore interviewed Sheryl Lister, the author of All My Sisters and Me. In her novel, four women explore the dynamics of sisterhood, love and family, while learning more about themselves along the way.

Sheryl Lister is a multi-award winning author and has enjoyed reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She is a former pediatric occupational therapist with over twenty years of experience and often says she “played” for a living.

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Diverse Voices Book Review contributor Kimberly Lau interviews Yu-Mei Balasingamchow about her debut novel, Names Have Been Changed. Their conversation explores Ophir, a Singaporean woman who commits a crime, flees the country, and spends the next decade moving through Tokyo, London, Colorado, and unnamed U.S. locations under changing identities. Lau and Balasingamchow discuss the novel’s themes of diaspora, survival, language, home, and the life-changing act of telling one’s story aloud.

Born and raised in Singapore and now based in Boston, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow earned her MFA from Boston University, teaches at GrubStreet, and has received awards and fellowships for her fiction.

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