Today I submitted the final draft of my forthcoming book HOW THE WORD IS PASSED. I worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever done. Travelled to places across the country reckoning with slavery and spoke to hundreds of people. I’m excited to share it with you all next year.

The book is a portrait of several different historical sites & tries to understand how each of them talk about their relationship to the history of slavery. Do they confront it? Do they erase it? And how do those decisions shape the memory of slavery in our public consciousness?

I learned so much from working on this. From scholars, public historians, descendents, guides, and strangers. Those conversations are the heartbeat of this project and they were so generous in sharing their time and knowledge with me. I’m incredibly grateful to all of them.