We got through fake fall, and while we still have a few hot days left, September 23 marked the fall equinox and start of the season of scales. I am on the hunt for the perfect boots to celebrate. I have a fuzzy memory of sangría-colored cowgirl boots—embroidered, round toe, with a little height in the heel. Please drop links in the comments if you see them. 

In honor of this most sacred time, we wanted to give you a snapshot of what this Libra season looks like in the world of Team Tressie. This month, I wrote about pandemic empathy and greening up our lives, participated in The Root Institute with the lovely Maiysha Kai, and today I’m giving a talk at Princeton on The Hustle Economy. It was a great start to the season and there is more in the works.

First, I’m participating in a special event with Kelly Corrigan and Kate Bowler happening live in Durham at the Carolina Theatre on October 12th. Kelly and I talked money on her podcast last month, and the conversation was so fun, we wanted to have another. You can get tickets here before they’re sold out.

This event starts off a week or so of premium Libra birthday activity. On October 13th and 14th, I’ll be traveling to Tennessee for the Memphis Reads program, where I’ll speak at Christian Brothers University and Rhodes College. Memphis Reads, a community common reading program, chose Thick as their book selection for 2021. I am grateful for the honor. You know how I feel about book people. You can follow along on socials for details and swing by if you can. This is my first post-pandemic travel gig, and it should be interesting.

Then, I’m headed to Nashville to explore the current moment in country music. Stay tuned for more about my trip, including a special project (and whether or not I ever track down those boots).

Listen, I am as surprised as you are. 

There is a lot to be said about how this happened and how I am making sense of it. I cannot articulate either at the moment. Everything happened quickly and here is a thing about me — I’m not so great at feeling moments. I just sort of soldier ahead and respond to milestones with more work. 

I have been a critical thinker for as long as I have known what that means. It means a lot to me that I never think of any dominant institution as “here” in the Drake sense of “I started from the bottom and now I’m here.” There are many heres and my people have heres and I hope my tribe builds new, better heres. 

At the same time, I am a little Black girl born to a long line of women who used to be little Black girls. It means something that the same New York Times that published my grandmother’s favorite crossword is now the place where I pontificate on things. 

Speaking of pontificating on things. This space will look a little different moving forward. We’ll still send out occasional updates on all things Tressie, and your subscription from now on will be free. For those who purchased Founding Member subscriptions, we will be donating those funds to support women of color writers through the Night School Bar here in Durham, NC. That’s a little over $25,000 that will go to supporting a community organization dedicated to organic intellectualism. The Night School Bar offers a range of humanistic short courses at affordable prices. They also support writers, with great care to consider Black women’s intellectual traditions. I trust them to spend your financial gift in alignment with essaying’s values. 

Speaking of those values, let’s be clear that I am joining The New York Times in no small part because of what we created here. I threw out theories and ideas and counterintuitive analyses of culture, economics and institutions. And you came along with me. We demonstrated what a newsletter community could tackle. You will see more of that with The New York Times and I am, in so many ways, just getting started. 

My academic home at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life energizes my sociological inflection on everything from popular culture to policy. You will be hearing more from the experts that I trust — and you had best believe those experts look a lot different than those who have traditionally dominated The Discourse. 

Your support has given me the space to think and write about what’s important to me, something Eve Ewing wished for me on a panel just this week and something Black women writers rarely get to do. I also want to acknowledge that this has always been a collaborative project. You see my name and hear my voice but you are also experiencing Lauren Garcia, Sarah Choi, Kera Bolonik and Zari Taylor.

This is a team of women, mostly women of color, who pull off feats well beyond our resources. We performed small miracles every single day of every single week. Team Tressie foments amazing ideas, translates them to different audiences, constantly checks me and us on our values, and makes me better. 

Thank you to them and to you. 

Read more

Recently, Dominique took to Twitter in search of advice on how to set up her mid-career p…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Since that essay, I h…

Read more

I had the opportunity to review a standout debut book for the New York Times Book Review, out today. Don’t Let It Get You Down is an essay collection by UC-Berkeley law professor Savala Nolan, who clerked in the Obama administration’s office of White House counsel. As I wrote, these 12 essays unfold out of her complex relationship with being a big-bodied, mixed-race Black woman—her father, a poor Black and Mexican man (“so poor we went to the bathroom in buckets under a ceiling hole repaired with tarp”), her mother, a Daughter of the American Revolution (WASP), growing up “in between” racial categories and their corresponding expectations, and dancing in the spaces between binaries of Black womanhood. There’s so much to recommend about this collection—her stark honesty, her voice, which has a vulnerability that never veers into self-indulgence. But what I think is especially resonant is that, while these essays give the sense that Nolan has not yet solved herself for herself, they also show how the pieces of our lives do not have to fit neatly in a frame in order to make a portrait worthy of attention.

I mention several authors in the review who have done masterful work for the essay genre—Clint Smith, Emily Bernard, Nishta J. Mehra, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, Mychal Denzel Smith, and Robert Jones Jr., among others.

The Black essay genre is having a real moment. We are breaking apart points of departure in blackness, which I really love. I cannot personally relate to Nolan’s desire for the white male gaze, for instance. And that is precisely why the book sparks for me.

There are two books in particular that can help contextualize this type of narrative of self: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, and The Art of the Black Essay by Cheryl Blanche Butler. Aspiring writers and curious readers would do well to add some of these to their collection.

Etcetera

Thank you to everyone who purchased autographed copies of Thick from Epilogue Books. Part of your purchase supports the Night School community education mission in the greater Durham, NC, area. I appreciate you and the crew at Epilogue.

I’m still not sold on the whole enterprise. I did it once after being asked a few times because it seemed like the path of least resistance. And I have manners. When someone asks you to marry them, it is impolite to say no. 

Read more

Read more

It is truly wild how medical doctors interact with me. There is, of course, the life-defining medical fai…

Read more

More specifically we talked about the moral panic around critical race theory in the discourse and in politics right now. This was a direct response to Florida’s Governor DeSantis passing a draconian, ridiculous, possibly illegal law requiring the…

Read more

NEWS FROM RANDOM HOUSE

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, MacArthur Fellow and bestselling author of THICK, a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction, is writing two new books for Random House. Executive Vice President and Associate Publisher Kate Medina and Vice President and Executive Editor Jamia Wilson acquired North American and audio rights at auction from Dorian Karchmar at WME.

The first book, BASIC, will be a paradigm-shifting exploration of how white identity is created, commodified, and disseminated as a dominant cultural, economic, and political force via hidden-in-plain-sight forms of status seeking. The second book, entitled THE VIVIAN, will be a searing memoir that explores contemporary Black motherhood through the lens of McMillan Cottom's own experiences with her mother and draws upon the history of the Jim Crow south, the post-civil rights movement, and America's foundational brutality towards Black mothers.

Dr. McMillan Cottom is a sociologist, professor, podcaster (Hear to Slay with Roxane Gay), and writer whose work has earned critical and popular renown. She is an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science; a senior faculty researcher with the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

“I am thrilled to be working on these books at this cultural inflection point and with Random House,” McMillan Cottom said. “In their own way and together, Black motherhood and whiteness' powerful banality define our society's foundational divisions. Kate and Jamia bring depth, breadth and passion to our dream partnership. Their editorial acumen is matched only by Random House's fierce commitment to books that change the way we understand the world."

“Tressie is a force,” says Random House publisher Andy Ward. “A rigorous thinker, a beautiful writer, and a voice whose ideas could not be more essential in this moment – and beyond. All of us at Random House are honored to be working with her.”

Random House is an imprint and a division of Penguin Random House LLC

That isn’t just PR-speak. I really am thrilled to be joining Random House and to be working with Kate and Jamia. This was not a casual decision. Everyone I talked to about my next two babies was brilliant, generous, and kind. Selling these books was a bit like a dream graduate seminar with a bunch of geniuses focused on your work in all good faith. I swoon just thinking about it.

I learned so much from publishing my first two books, both with the estimable Tara Grove for The New Press. It is precisely because Tara is so great that I know how important the editor-writer relationship is to producing your very best work. Kate, Jamia and I have the spark.

Between us, I kept telling my best friends and my agent (the marvelously witty, smart-ass, caring Dorian Karchmer with Endeavor-William Morris) that I was casting the editors for the documentary of my life. You see, I am an only child and a Libra. I take for granted that there will be a documentary one day. I mean, I wrote an Oscar speech when I was nine-years-old. I do not want for confidence, if you know what I’m saying. When I one day watch that documentary, I want my lifelong editors to be just as I imagined they would be. I just know that Kate and Jamia will do splendidly in the Tressie documentary!

More seriously, I do not write unless I have something to say and I know in my deepest self that only I can write it. Here is what I know for sure: these are those projects, this is the right time to write them, and I have the best circumstances from which to be writing them.

What does that mean for you? It means you will see snippets of thinking here on essaying. You may see formal thinking in your favorite publications over the next few years. And, you will hear a lot of whining. It is all part of the process. Welcome.

If you are awake this Saturday morning, you still have time to join me in a conversation with Farah Jasmine Griffen about her absolutely beautiful new essay collection “Read Until You Understand” at the Schomburg Literary Festival.

If you are in Memphis, please get ready to be THICK’d up because it has been selected as the 2021 Memphis Common Read!

And, I will be joining the Loyala University-Chicago community this Fall as THICK becomes their 2021 Rambler Read.

Thank you to the selection committee on this one. I know that choosing the university common read is a daunting task. I am really honored to be selected.

These aren’t theories in the academic sense of the word. They do not predict anything or provide testable hypotheses. They do not interpret an artifact or deconstruct any social categories. I don’t even …

Read more

I have not had a summer vacation since I started this profession. Still, I would be lying if I said that having those three months away from the daily office grind doesn’t contribute greatly to my work satisfaction.

During the pand…

Read more