Author Talk—Black in Blues: How Color Tells the Story of My People

Imani Perry is the National Book Award-winning author of South to America, as well as eight other books of nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Perry lives between Philadelphia and Cambridge with her two sons.

Taylor Lena McTootle is a writer, educator, and a May 2025 graduate of Emerson College's MFA Creative Writing program. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Torch Literary Arts, The Periplus 2023 Call-and-Response Anthology, and Boston Compass. Through storytelling, she explores the contradictions and congruences of Black movement and belonging. A Boston transplant by way of Washington, DC, Taylor has been a bookseller at Just Book-ish since it opened this past November.