Nafissa Thompson-Spires's debut short-story collection is Heads of the Colored People.From her Guardian interview with Anita Sethi:
The title of your collection comes from the 19th-century abolitionist James McCune Smith and his sketches Heads of the Colored People. What led you to engage with his work?--Marshal Zeringue
My husband is a professor of literature and he writes a lot about McCune Smith and other 19th-century writers who were publishing sketches in [abolitionist] Frederick Douglass’s newspapers – he would come downstairs excited and talk about this research. Much of it is dealing with the same issues we’re dealing with today – and now we have a president who is very vocal about his racism. I wanted to think about what it means to be a black person today but also respond to what James McCune Smith was theorising almost 200 years ago.
What else motivates your writing?
I want to read more about people who have had experiences similar to my own. I’d grown up feeling like I was the only black person like myself, though of course that wasn’t the case. I wanted to see more stories about awkward, nerdy black people, and black people who were the only ones in a particular space, and what it meant to...[read on]