Join us for a conversation with Rochelle Riley, author of The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery, a powerful collection of essays from well-known Americans on what life post-slavery remains like for many African Americans. Joining Rochelle is Tamara Payne, Pulitzer Prize winning co-author of The Dead Are Arising.

Many African Americans, who are descended from people whose unpaid labor built this land, have had to spend the last century and a half carrying the dual burden of fighting racial injustice and rising above the lowered expectations and hateful bigotry that attempt to keep them shackled to that past. These descendants have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. The Burden aims to address this problem and is a must-read for every American.

Rochelle Riley is an award-winning newspaper columnist who is no longer seeking permission to put the burden down. She has fearlessly called out elected officials who should have been ashamed of themselves and has helped raise millions of dollars for just causes, especially the fight for improved adult literacy. She offers commentary on MSNBC and NPR and contributes to Essence and Ebony magazines. She was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 2016, received the 2017 Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and Northwestern University, and was awarded the 2017 Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Tamara Payne is the co-author of The Dead Are Arising. Tamara's co-author was her father, Les Payne (1941–2018). Les was a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, foreign correspondent, editor at Newsday, and founder of the National Association of Black Journalists. Tamara Payne served as her father’s principal researcher while working in commercial real estate, and she completed The Dead Are Arising following his death in March 2018. She is a graduate of William Smith College in Geneva, N.Y., who previously worked for PBS’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and taught English in China. The Dead are Arising won the 2021 Pulitzer prize in biography and the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction, along with many other awards.

We invite you to support the author by purchasing a copy of their book from Browseabout Books by clicking HERE. Call-in orders are accepted at (302) 226-2665 or you can stop by the store to purchase a copy. For store hours, please visit their website. Each copy purchased comes with a signed bookplate.

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