Charis welcomes Neesha Powell-Ingabire in conversation with K Toyin Agbebiyi for a discussion of Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast. In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia's facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.

In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire's hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area's long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick's Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.

In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home's collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde's advice: "It is better to speak."

Neesha Powell-Ingabire (she & they) is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, and community & cultural organizer living in Atlanta/traditional Muscogee territory. She’s the director of popular education at Press On, a Southern movement media collective.

Neesha reports on the justice movements of the Black, trans, queer, and Southern communities to which she belongs and writes essays to recover her own history and the histories of her ancestors and their ancestral homes. Her writings have been published in various online and print publications, including Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Scalawag, and VICE. Her forthcoming debut book, Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast (out on September 24 from Hub City Press), chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.

K Adetoyin (Toyin) Agbebiyi is a Black disabled lesbian, organizer, writer, and strategist from Kennesaw, Georgia. The majority of K’s work revolves around political education, writing, and organizing strategy in regards to ending the prison industrial complex. K has given trainings and lectures at universities such as Yale, Columbia, the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa,  and the University of Illinois- Chicago Medical School. K’s writing has been featured on Rewire News, WearYourVoice and also in MoMA PS1. They’ve also been featured in magazines such as BITCH and Glamour. In 2020, they were chosen for the BITCH 50 list. K currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia. When they are not working and organizing, they enjoy spending time reading, exploring outside, and hanging out with their friends. To learn more about K visit their site https://kagbebiyi.cargo.site/

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Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast--Neesha Powell-Ingabire in conversation with K Toyin Agbebiyi