Read the Resistance, May 2018: Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

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CHAT LIVE with Hermione Hoby and Jennifer Baker! Tuesday, May 29, 2018, on Facebook Live

For this month of Read the Resistance, an online book club that highlights written works of and about resistance, we asked Hermione Hoby, author of Neon in Daylight, to recommend a book that exemplifies resistance to her. Her pick? Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins. Join Hoby for a discussion with Jennifer Baker about the book on May 29 via Facebook Live.

“Kathleen Collins was a civil rights activist, educator, and also one of the first (if not the first) African-American women to direct a feature film—1982’s Losing Ground sees Sara, a philosophy professor seeking to claim space for her intellectual and creative life within her marriage to Bill, a painter,” said Hoby. “Verve and wisdom run rich through that film, as they do these stories, which were published in 2016 decades after her death. Many of her characters are women living complicated lives with consciousness and courage and that to me seems one of the most essential forms of resistance—that as wives and daughters and friends and lovers, but also as citizens, we might find the imagination and strength to make up our own world.”

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About Hermione Hoby
Hermione grew up in Bromley, south London and graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 2007 with a double first in English Literature. After working at The Guardian and Observer, she moved to New York where she’s lived since 2010. Her first novel, Neon in Daylight, was published by Catapult in January 2018 to critical acclaim. A two times New York Times Editors’ choice, the book was praised as “luminous and wonderful” by the LA Review of Books and hailed as “a radiant first novel” by New York Times critic Parul Sehgal, who compared it to the works of Joan Didion and Renata Adler.

Hermione also writes about culture for The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and others, and has profiled hundreds of cultural figures including Toni Morrison, Meryl Streep, Naomi Campbell, Laurie Anderson, and Debbie Harry. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department of Columbia University and is at work on a second novel.

Photo by Douglas Collins

About Kathleen Collins
Kathleen Collins, who died in 1988 at age forty-six, was an African-American playwright, writer, filmmaker, director, and educator from Jersey City. She was the first black woman to produce a feature length film.

About Jennifer Baker
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, and contributing editor to Electric Literature. She was formerly social media director and writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and previously served as panels organizer and social media manager for the nonprofit, We Need Diverse Books. She currently volunteers with the nonprofit I, Too Arts Collective to preserve the Langston Hughes brownstone in Harlem. In 2017, she was awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship and Queens Council on the Arts New Work Grant (as well as their award for Artistic Excellence) for Nonfiction Literature. Jennifer is also the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life with Atria Books.