Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

in conversation with Kristen Elias Rowley

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“Emotional range without consequence,” Negesti Kaudo writes in her debut collection, Ripe, is a privilege of whiteness. In these essays, she fights back, exhorting readers to follow her through fury, grief, love, and hope as she confronts what it means to own her Blackness and her body in contemporary America. A scathing and nuanced cultural critic, she disentangles intersections of race, class, pop culture, size, sexuality, and more in spaces where she always seems to be either too Black or not Black enough. From attending private school as a poor Black student to the evolution of her hair routine to being fat and sexual when society says she should be neither, Kaudo overlooks nothing as she names the ways that white America simultaneously denigrates and steals Black culture. Most of all, she writes against the idea that a Black woman’s anger makes her an “angry Black woman,” claiming full emotional range as her birthright and as a tool against injustice on her quest to find herself no matter how uncomfortable the journey.

Negesti Kaudo is a Midwestern essayist who holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago and has worked as a copywriter, a sex toy columnist, and an adjunct writing instructor. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Ripe is her first book.

Kristen Elias Rowley (she/her) is Editor in Chief at The Ohio State University Press, where she acquires for the Mad Creek Books imprint she launched in 2017, publishing a dozen nonfiction, fiction, graphic novels, and poetry books annually. Books she’s edited have been recognized by the National Book Foundation (which named Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave and Other Essays a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in nonfiction), Lambda Literary, PEN America, and many others. Authors she’s published have gone on to receive the Rona Jaffe Award, NEA Creative Writing fellowships, and Guggenheim fellowships. She’s been in university publishing for 17 years, previously acquiring for the University of Nebraska Press and Potomac Books.

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Ripe: An Afternoon with Negesti Kaudo and Kristen Elias Rowley