Soyica Diggs Colbert Writes the History of Icons Through Their Friendships

Kate Carpenter
Welcome to the Drafting the Past podcast, a show all about how historians write history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and in most episodes of the podcast I interview a historian and get down to the details of not just what they write about, but how they do that research and writing in the first place. If you’re a historian or an aspiring historian—or even if you just love learning about how history works—and you want to spend more time thinking about the craft of writing, this is the place for you. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player so you don’t miss an episode.
Today I’m joined by Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert to talk about her newest book, Freedom’s Gate: Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone Live at the New York Nightclub that Shaped the Civil Rights Movement.

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Thank you for having me.

Kate Carpenter
Soyica is the Idol Family Professor of history at Georgetown University, as well as the interim provost, which means she has a lot of demands on her time. We’ll get into how she prioritizes her writing in this episode.
She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards, and has a background in literature and performance studies, including previously serving as the associate director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. She is the author of several books, including Radical Vision, her biography of Lorraine Hansberry. In this episode, we talk about how that book led to her new book, Freedom’s Gate. I was also eager to hear about how she translates visual and audio performances to the page, and how she brings to life the texture and uncertainty of what it was like to be these women when they were just figuring out life in New York, before they became the icons we recognize today.
Here’s my conversation with Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert.

Soyica Diggs Colbert
In some ways, I think about my career as a writer as emerging through academic writing. I have a PhD in English literature, and the first work that I published is in scholarly journals and academic presses. But really, my career as a writer began as an English major at Georgetown University, where I now teach, and learning and writing about figures that continue to inform my work, and so I'm somewhat delighted that my life has taken a full circle moment because one of the first classes I took at Georgetown was a class on African American autobiography with Angela Mitchell, and at that time, I never thought that I would start writing biographies, but that's where my life has turned. And so I think about the long trajectory of my training as part of my life as a writer, and that shows up in the way that I think about questions when I'm writing for popular audiences or for academic ones.

Kate Carpenter
Well, let's just kind of start with the basics. When and where do you like to do your writing?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
So I'm a morning writer. I write in the morning. I try to get up extra early to carve out time for writing because my life is a bit busy right now. I have written all of my books in home offices, but now I've taken to writing in my campus office, just because of the packed density of my days. But as with most writers, I have a ritual, I have a groove, and when I'm sitting in a certain seat or in a certain place, my brain clicks into writing mode or research mode or reading mode, and I'm able to get some work done in those contexts. So I've moved a lot in the last 20 years since I graduated from graduate school, and have had different writing places. But usually it's a quiet place. I I write with no music in the background except for this book a little bit, but for the most part quiet. And every morning I try to write a little bit and or do some research that's towards my writing.

Kate Carpenter
How do you like to organize your your sources and your notes?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
It's usually based on how I'm thinking about the organization of the book I'm working on. So some of my books have been organized thematically, and so the research has followed that. Some of it has been organized chronologically, but my last two books, both a single biography and a group biography. A lot of the work was organized chronologically, and then I would layer thematic concerns on top of that. But it's usually thinking about what is the arc, the narrative arc of the book, and then having the resources and the research organized in relationship to that. And of course, that changes as you're writing and thinking and revising, but that's the initial approach that I normally take.

Kate Carpenter
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Usually, it's with a question. So sometimes it's varied. Sometimes it'll be a spark. I'm usually inspired by a piece of art or a song that I've heard or some cultural reference that I'm curious about unpacking, and I have a question about it or curiosity, and things will unfold from there. As many writers have said, writing is just thinking on the page, and so one of the joys for me of writing is figuring out the puzzle, the mystery, whatever question is preoccupying me at the time, and so it can be a bit of a messy process because I'm often arriving at the answer to the question at the end, and then you have to go back and make sure that the story makes sense given you know where you started and where you ended. But it's often a spark, whether it's you know an inspiration, external inspiration that I'm then trying to make sense of, and for me, the payoff as a writer is when, at the end of the book, I feel like I've arrived at an answer to my question, or a new insight, or you know, circling back to where I began. I think that I've hopefully done my job.

Kate Carpenter
How do you approach revising your work as you go?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Revising is a huge part of my work. I find the revision process actually a little bit easier than the original drafting process. I love to write in community, and that I think has informed my curiosity of my current book, Freedom's Gate. And I often am engaged with writing partners. So for this book, I was in a writing group for a few years. Where consistently we'd write together, we'd sit on Zoom and write together. And then at the beginning of the meeting, we would discuss what we were aiming to accomplish in this writing session. At the end, we would regroup. The group also read drafts of each other's work and gave feedback, so that was very important. But my writing and revision is often in conversation with other people, and so people reading drafts, giving me feedback, pushing me along, suggesting sources, and for me, that's been a very productive way. Writing can be very isolating and singular, and so when I'm to the revision process, being able to get feedback from folks and pushing the work along has been really helpful. And editors, of course, editors are amazing. We have a good editor. I had an amazing editor for this book. Has helped me a lot in the revision process as well.

Kate Carpenter
I mean, you mentioned this a little bit when you're talking about when you write, but as I was preparing for this interview, I was I was sort of just amazed at how busy you are right now, juggling multiple roles, an administrative role. How do you make sure that research and writing doesn't kind of get lost in that shuffle?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
It's very hard. Some days it does, and I beat myself up on those days. But if I'm having a good day, I will get up in the morning, exercise, have breakfast, and write. And on those days, at the end of my day, I always think, well, at least I did two good things today. Hopefully, more than two good things. But it's comforting, to know I started my day by prioritizing two things that are important to me. I got them done, and then everything that happens after that is sort of icing on the cake. And as I said, every day I don't achieve that goal, but that's the intention that I wake up with because, as most, at least for me, if I don't prioritize first thing in the morning, then it can get lost throughout the shuffle of the day, and so that's a big part. I would say the other thing that is harder for me, but I continue to work on is carving out time to engage with new and exciting cultural production. Because again, for me as a writer who thinks about culture, being able to engage with other artists' works is really important for me as inspiration. And good writers are always good readers. And so, really seeing what's out in the field? What's new? What's exciting? What new plays are being produced? What new music is being released? All of that helps me in my writing process.

Kate Carpenter
The book that you published before this one was a biography of Lorraine Hansberry, and then she, of course, is one of the key figures in Freedom's Gate. Did the first project lead to this one, and what I'm really curious about is what was it like to go from writing a biography of just one person to a whole group of women?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
It absolutely led to this one. So as I was finishing Radical Vision, my biography of Lorraine Hansberry, I came across across this mention of this nightclub, the Village Gate, where a young Nina Simone was performing. A 20-something Nina Simone was performing, and a teenager Richard Pryor was opening for her. And I thought to myself, "What is this place? Why don't I know about it? How did this happen?" And so it really began. And and as many folks may know, Hansberry and Simone were close friends, and so that's why I was reading about Simone as I was finishing the book on Hansberry, and Hansberry also performed at the Village Gate. So I was curious about this place, and it really became this gift that kept on giving because as I began to explore, I realized that all of the women who are at the center of my book, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Miriam Makeba, Abby Lincoln all performed and collaborated at the Village Gate, but so did a young Harry Belafonte and Max Roach and Richard Pryor and Sidney Portier, and so, and James Baldwin used to hang out and watch the women perform there. So it was really this explosion of riches that was unfolding in this place, and I wanted to know, you know, how was it built? Why did these artists come here? What was the attraction? What were their relationships like? Who was the founder? Why is this place open to them? Because you have to remember. So the book is set from 1958 to 1968 in New York, and although, you know, we are post Brown v Board of Education, so legal segregation has now been outlawed, culturally, there were still a lot of segregated spaces in the north and the south, including nightclubs. And so the Village Gate was an outlier in some sense because it was so open to mixing of all kinds: mixings of races, mixing of gender, mixing of religious background, mixing of culture. There was all different types of music that was performed there, and so I wanted to know how this place came to be, given the predominant cultural context of the time, and again how these young artists, all of the artists I'm writing about, who have now become household names, were just 20-somethings coming to New York. Many of them came to New York in '58. That's why I start the book there. And so they're arriving in New York for the first time. How did they meet each other? How did they come to work together? These are all questions that I take up in the book, and I was curious about. But most fundamentally, getting back to the first part of your question, I also left Radical Vision, thinking there was more I could say about Hansberry and Simone's relationship, and so that also inspired writing this book.

Kate Carpenter
Was it? Did it feel different to write a biography of multiple people than one?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Absolutely, it was. There were a lot more challenges in this book than the Hansberry book in part, I'm so grateful to the Hansberry Literary Trust because they've kept such meticulous, they've taken such meticulous care of her archive, which is located at the Schomburg Center. And so, while there are other archives that help inform our understanding of Hansberry's life at the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere, a bulk of the archival material about Hansberry is in one place at one library in New York City, and so it contained the project in certain ways. And then, unfortunately, as we know, Hansberry had a tragically short life, and so that also contained the project because my book on Hansberry really just takes up her life and not the afterlife of her work after she passed away. In this case, I had five women coming from different parts of the world again, landing in New York City, but their archives are in different places, and the thing that was fascinating about this book is there was info. There's information about the women, as with Hansberry and other people's archives, and so the set of unboxing and digging that I had to do for this book was much broader. And for me, as a scholar of Black culture and history, I would go down a rabbit hole that was a bit tangential to my book, and have to remind myself what the central question was. So I spent a lot of time in Max Roach's papers and the Baldwin papers to Schomburg, really trying to understand these women's lives. And I found some gems that are included in the book, but it was much harder to think about the theme, the thematic thread that will pull everything together, given the richness of the information that was available to me.

Kate Carpenter
What did you think of as the central question?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
The central question was, or is, how did this place help to cultivate these women, these geniuses? I would say, and how might we understand their friendship as a necessary part of the artists and activists that they became? So you know, again, this is mid-century U.S. Many of the women in the book are better known for their intimate relationships as a as a way of pushing their careers forward than their friendships and so one of the things I want to establish with the book is whether or not and I think it the the answer is yes but how women's friendships inform the artists that these women became. And so Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln's relationship is well known and obviously is important to her development as an artist. But one of the cases that I wanted to make in the book is that her friendship with Maya Angelou was also very important to her becoming an artist. And omitting that piece of people's stories leaves us as readers and thinkers and people living in the world with only a partial information. And so, even though marriage was a fun— you know, a big part of the social contract during the mid 20th century and arguably late 20th century as well, there are other relationships that help us understand how people became the figures that they are. And in writing life stories, that's part of the part of what we're trying to unlock: understanding how this person came to be on a postage stamp, or you know, the face of Broadway, or you know, the voice of Africa, which is what Miriam Makeba became known as. How did they get there? And what I'm suggesting is that yes, their intimate relationships were part of that, but as interestingly, their friendships and the work that they made together is as a big part of that.

Kate Carpenter
This is something I just really loved about this book that it there's such a focus on community and how you become who who you are in community. And so often in history, and especially in life writing, there's kind of this emphasis on the individual and how they are this this singular person, and you also mention I think maybe in the acknowledgement that that your students were always the ones who were really asking more about relationships and wanted to know more. Did that that question that focus on relationships did it change how you approach the archival sources when you were researching?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Absolutely. So yes, I taught a class on Baldwin, Hansberry, and Simone. Again, a storied friendship. Many people know well Hansberry's deep relationship with both James Baldwin and Nina Simone. And my students, when I taught the class, wanted to know more about that relationship, their friendship. There are stories that are well known, but if you dig into the archive, you find that there's more to uncover there. And so, in thinking about the relationships, it was really charting what were the important moments in each figure's life, and when did they intersect with other other figures in the book. And so, again, there was a mapping that I did of a timeline for each figure, and then there's a timeline for the whole book. And I was looking for those points of intersection. And then, as in life writing, you're always thinking about not overemphasizing the importance of an event if it actually didn't have an impact on the person's life. And so, trying to understand at these moments of intersection how important it really was to the development of the person, and so all of that played into thinking about what moments to highlight, thinking about which moments to write a chapter around, and how it fit into larger world events as well. Because all of these figures had, you know, important intersections with and with significant historical events, so the March on Washington, testifying before the United Nations. There's a protest at the UN that's covered in the in the New York Times that I write about that the women were a part of, and so significant historical events on their own face, and then how they came to be a part of these moments, and how they inform their relationships is how I thought about picking out things in the book because there's lots of things that in any book there's lots of things that remain on the cutting room floor. So there are performances that Nina Simone have with Miriam Makeba that I might just mention because it wasn't a significant turning point. And then there's this beautiful performance they have at Carnegie Hall, which was a dream for Nina Simone, as you know, for her by herself, and for me, it's interesting to think about. She had this dream. What does it mean that it ended up coming to fruition with her close friend as her opening act, and how did that come to be? And so you see these moments in the archive of all the performances that they had together at the Village Gate, and I use that to understand this culminating moment that they had together at Carnegie Hall.

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, it's helpful to hear kind of about the timeline because I was so struck at how how great of a job you do in this book of intersecting, you know, finding where these stories kind of intersect and weaving them together, which seems hard to do in terms of in terms of actually putting it together. How how did you think about that narrative structure? How did you keep track of what you were doing any given time?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Again, it was helpful to have a great editor who kept me on the ball, cut a lot of fat. There, you know, digressions that were fascinating to me, but might not have been fascinating to my reader. And you know, a lot of it was informed by thinking about the arc of each woman's life, where they started when they came to New York, what had preceded them coming there. So, what did they come to New York with, in terms of their training, their family background, their history, and then understanding how that arc was informed by these different moments of intersection they had with these the other women. Luckily for me, Maya Angelou is a writer, and so she has a lot of letters in her archive and correspondence for part of the book she's living. And so she moves to New York, and then she moves to Africa first, Egypt, and then Ghana during the part of the book. And so, charting her relationships during that period, a lot of it is through correspondence and her own writing about that time period. But it's helpful. That was helpful for me again in understanding who is she writing to, why is this important to her? What are the references? How is it incorporating in her development? Because there's a lot of introspection in the letters as well, and so you're able to get a sense of how she's changing and evolving as a writer, a thinker, a person in the world, and how that is motivated and or supported by her ongoing relationships with her friends in New York, and so it was trying to again make it get to the point of the payoff for the book. Hopefully, for the reader is if I know this figure in at their prime, what is the backstory? How did they get there? And the book tries to provide that and make a case that these relationships were a big part of how these artists got there, and so the arc and the organization of the book was informed by that. But I'm pleased to say that it wasn't, you know, me artificially imposing that, but that the archive bears that out. That there are all of these moments of intimate connection and reflection on by the women themselves on the relationships that helped to motivate my reading of their work, and so again, Abby Lincoln has wrote a memoir that was never published, where she reflects a lot on how who she became and her relationships and her connections. Obviously, Hansberry was a writer, has letters and journals and so forth. You get access to these moments of introspection in their work through some of these modes of writing, and that is what I use to make the case for the importance of of these relationships.

Kate Carpenter
I also think one of the strengths of this book is how three dimensional the women are in your writing. That you you know we kind of see the nuances of their personalities and their relationships, both good and bad, we see sort of how their thinking about things changes over time, or sometimes even contradictory. How did you make sure all of that texture stayed in the book?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
It was important for me to know, for my reader to know that the women are just as complicated as you and I. That their greatness didn't was not diminished by their complexity, and that they struggled with questions and evolved as human beings over time. And that's part of the excitement of the book. You know, again, when I was writing about Hansberry in Radical Vision, and in this book, I'm struck by the fact that at turns there are these artistic geniuses, or you know they're making history, literally making history. Hansberry is the first Black woman with a play on Broadway, and she's also a 20-something trying to figure out who she is in the world, living in New York City by herself, you know, on on her own or independently, I should say, she's married at the time, but you know, as an adult living in New York, and so she's figuring herself out, just like any 20-year-old, 20-something is figuring herself out, as are the other women. And so they make mistakes, they change over the period of the decade in the book. They learn new things about themselves. They have different priorities. There's the natural pulls of life that inform who they are and how they become, and that changes their perspective. And I wanted to capture all that because the other hope that I have for the book is that it gives us a roadmap of possibility as we're thinking about our own lives, our own developments, our own trajectories. And so I didn't want to sugarcoat or or hide some of the more difficult parts of their lives or their experience because that also made them who they are, and I think it was helpful that they had this community of women and artists around them in those difficult moments to navigate them. We're dealing with a very complicated time in U.S. history in the book, and again, the women are dealing with a very crucial moment in their development as adults, and so all of those things are intersecting in their work, their politics, and how they see themselves in the world. And so, I wanted to capture that. And then, of course, we're dealing with a very transformative moment for women during this period, and the fact that many of these women are becoming economically independent is something that informs who they are and how they see themselves. And I wanted the book to showcase that as well. And what that means in 2026 is very different. Being economically independent as a woman means something very different than in 1962, three, four. Yeah, I think you know.

Kate Carpenter
It seems like one of the challenges of a book like this is that for so many readers, these are very well-known women, right? And so we have this kind of like picture of them in our heads as change makers, as famous, and not as sort of that you know 20-something who's figuring it out. How did you think about the audience as you were writing this book, and and making sure that you could take the audience back to those moments?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
One of the things that I tried to do was to set the larger social and historical context, so that the artist, so that the readers could understand why this was a pivotal moment for the artist, but also why it might have been difficult, and so there's a turning point in the book where Nina Simone is moving from her lifelong aspiration to be a classical musician to writing freedom music, and I wanted the reader to understand why that was a difficult choice for her, and also what it meant for her development. Most of the music that Nina Simone is most well known for is really from this period and then beyond, as she begins to lean into freedom music. And so, understanding the transition, I thought was important because she dedicates so much of her early life to this singular dream. And you can imagine with any human being, if you spend all of your life moving towards this singular dream, giving that up is heartrending. And so, what would motivate that? How does it happen in community? What else is calling her in this moment that convinces her that she needs to move in a different direction? Because certainly, she had the talent to achieve her goals. Society was not quite ready for her at the time. I would say the society was not quite ready for any of these women. For those who live longer, there was time for us to catch up to them, and you see that in their fame, really. But at the time, they're doing all of this singular work in terms of they're not really being space for women and Black women in particular to do this work at the time, and they're opening those doors. And so, for anyone who is carving a new space, you know you hit some bumps on the road, and you're pushed back, you're rebuffed. And the book tries to help us understand how they got over those hurdles. And so, it was really important for me to understand. For me, as a reader, to understand that, and then hopefully impart that on my, for my readers. I would say the other thing that I hope the readers walk away from the book knowing is that there's a rich, there's more richness to uncover about these women than we already know, and it's hiding, or not hiding, but it's sitting in their archives, and they're free and open to the public, and so that's another reason why I tried to provide really rich notes in the book, so that folks who are interested in something that I might not linger on have breadcrumbs to go back and do their own discovery. I love that.

Kate Carpenter
Early in this conversation, you mentioned that for this book, you sometimes made an exception to not listening to music while writing, and I know obviously music and performance is a huge part of this book. I think you have a playlist to accompany this book so that people can listen. But music and performances are difficult to translate onto the page so that sort of readers can experience them and the reading and think about them. How did you do that?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
It took a lot of research. So first, let me say that I've been writing this book over a number of years, and my life has changed over that time period. But there was a period when I was working on the book where I was on leave, thanks to the generosity of the Guggenheim Foundation. And I remember a friend texting me and said, "How how was your day?" And I said, "I spent my whole day listening to Nina Simone." What? How wonderful is it that my life allows that to be the case? So there were whole days that I spent listening. Many of the artists in the book have several versions of different songs they record over time. So I thought a lot about that. But I spent a lot of time listening, and this goes to your point about the performance aspect of the book, I look spend a lot of time looking at photographs. There are video recordings in the Village Gate. There's a performance by Nina Simone that was recorded. There's a performance in Alabama that Nina Simone does that I write about the end of the book. That also there's a video recording of, and so I use that to try to as inspiration and information to translate for my reader, but I wanted to try as best I could to put the reader in the place. And so, what does it sound like? What do I see? What does it smell like? If I have access to that, you know, is it a cramped space? Is it a cavernous space? Am I standing up and dancing? Am I sitting down? It was important for me to note how the Village Gate's architecture was different from some of the other clubs at the time. So again, the reader might really have a sense of what it meant to be in this physical place, and hopefully, bringing all of that to the reader gives some sense of again why these moments were impactful and important, and the texture of them, and how the women experienced them. The other thing that I found in the letters and the writing is that, as we all know, the way that our most intimates see us might not necessarily be the way we see ourselves, and so the women were able to observe things about each other that, based on their diaries and their journals and so forth, it wasn't clear that the women themselves had completely digested yet. And so, being able to have that reflection back of what the audience is seeing and what the performer is understanding was also something I tried to establish in the book, and that's what's so great about great relationships and lifelong friendships is that the people who know you best might have insights about you that you have not even made yourself. And so that was another goal of the book to really think about how the women saw themselves, and then how the world saw them. You know, which is in their stardom and burgeoning stardom, but then how their intimates saw them, and all of these are different perspectives that the book tries to capture, so that the reader might have a perspective now about the women that could be enriched by these other points of view.

Kate Carpenter
In your remarkable career, you also have have a background in theater as an academic, but as a dramaturg, as associate director of the Shakespeare Theater Company and and other great things. How does that work shape the way that you think about writing a book like this?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
So I'm so grateful for my time at the Shakespeare Theater Company. Before I moved to Washington D.C., I lived in New Hampshire and was writing then and really launching my career. And when I moved to Washington D.C., the trajectory of my career changed significantly because I was now in a city where there was lots of large theater and music and dance, and so some of the work that I was reading about when I lived in New Hampshire, I was able to experience when I moved to Washington D.C. But the other influential piece about my affiliation with the Shakespeare Theater Company and working as a dramaturg in other theaters is that in the theater you are literally building a world, and so you are the set design is creating the physical space, the built environment. The sound design is again what do we hear sometimes in theater, you might smell things. You know that you're creating a whole immersive environment, and being able to work as a dramaturg. I saw how that was done, how the different artists worked together, the sound design, the set design, the director, the actors, how that all those pieces fit together to create the world that the audience gets to experience, and so that again informed how I approached my writing, where I set emphasis, even how I thought about analyzing plays when I'm reading a play. You know, what am I reading for? It changed, and so I'm so grateful for that those experiences because I got to learn from brilliant people about choices and you know what inspires certain decisions on the part of characters and how that interfaces with these other choices around music and sound and the built environment of the theater. You know, it's informed some curatorial work that I've done, and all of that I hope has sharpened how I when I look at a picture. What I'm looking at, I'm looking at a photograph. When I'm listening to a soundtrack or a piece of music, when I'm reading a journal, I'm thinking about the music that Nina Simone was composing at the same time she was writing this. And when I'm reading a letter from Hansberry, I'm thinking about the play she was working on at the time, and those thoughts are intersecting and informing how I'm reading this letter, this journal, this piece of music.

Kate Carpenter
I noticed in your acknowledgments that you mentioned that there was a life writing symposium that really influenced you while you were working on this. What did you learn through that symposium that helped you write this book?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
We talked and learned a lot about craft. So again, you know, a good writer, in my opinion, is a good reader, and so it was helpful to know what the other folks who were working on life writing, what they were reading, what had inspired them, how they were thinking about approaching a certain question. I mean, it was everything from big picture questions of how might we understand the use of a source, to what are our models for writing, again, craft, to how we set up or what the utility is of a flashback, and how to construct that in a way that doesn't completely pull your reader out of a scene, but gives them enough background information so they can understand the scene, and so that's always a delicate balance of how much background we include and how much of the foreground we set up. Again, my training in theater is helpful here because, as you'll notice, in a play, the director is usually directing the audience's gaze towards something that's happening on stage, but there might be also something happening in the background, which is important. And so, how you structure the scene so that folks are looking where you want them to look and paying attention to what you want them to pay attention to is similar for writing and helping them to understand how that moment fits into the arc of the story is something you're always juggling as a writer and so the life writing group is really helpful from that perspective just to see how other people are tackling these questions, and my larger engagement in the arts was helpful on that front too. But I would just return to the point that since I was in graduate school, I found writing community to be really helpful to my development, and I think that that's part of the reason why I'm drawn to understanding how community informed the work of the reader, the writers that I, and the artists that I'm writing about in this book.

Kate Carpenter
Could you tell us more about the writing communities you've been involved in?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Oh, so many, so many. Everywhere I've been, I have been a part of a writing community. So, I went to graduate school at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and there was a seminar called the Black Diaspora Seminar. And you have to remember, I think it's important for the listeners to know that I went straight from undergrad to graduate school. All of my mentors told me not to, but I was hard headed, and so I'm this, you know, 22 year old in graduate school for the first time, studying literature, and I get invited to this seminar. All the graduate students in our cohort were invited, and I walk down into this basement, and it's standing room only of people who want to talk about literature. And so it filled my nerdish heart to be realize that I was not on a singular journey, but I was part of an intellectual community, and so that really shaped for me the importance of or how powerful it can be to know that you're not working alone. That there's other people who are asking similar questions, and so I was a part of a reading and writing group of graduate students when I was in graduate school. When I moved to my first job in New Hampshire. I joined and was part of a writing group of folks working in literature throughout the New England area, and that informed my first book and my second book as well. And then when I moved to Washington D.C., I again endeavored to create different communities of practice or participate in different communities of practice, because you learn so much from your your fellow writers, and you also learn from how they're reading your work. So, what what what does it make sense? What questions do they have? Where do they want to know more? Where do they feel like you need to provide more evidence? So, in my one writing group that I was a part of for Freedom's Gate, I remember I was describing the opening night of the Raisin in the Sun party, and folks in the group were curious about how I had so much detail and how I how I could evidence what I was saying in the book. And I realized that I hadn't included that Gordon Parks photographed the whole event, and so the details ours are providing what necklace someone was wearing, how someone's hair was copped, who was hugging who were all based on the Gordon Parks images, and so really helping to pull my reader along. My first readers are folks who have been in writing groups with me, and so what's good in the book is informed by their feedback, and the shortcomings of the book are all mine. But I'm grateful for all of the folks who have read drafts and cultivated a community of learning, because it's not just them giving feedback on your individual draft, but hearing what other people are asking and endeavoring in their own writing also has informed how I approach my work.

Kate Carpenter
Who do you read for inspiration?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Oh, so many people. I read a lot of folks for craft for this book. So Maggie Doherty, who wrote a book called The Equivalents, which is about the first cohort of women at the Radcliffe Institute, was a huge inspiration for me. It's a group biography. It's about women. It's around a similar historical time period, and so that was really helpful for me. And I've also, you know, read a lot of biographies, group biographies, and individual biographies. Jonathan Eig's biography of King, which won the Pulitzer, was, you know, a huge inspiration for me, just because he does such a excellent job of mediating between King's story in that book and the larger historical context that he's endeavoring to create. And so, how he uses periodicals, magazines, newspaper stories is really instruct was really instructive for me as a writer. Jesmyn Ward's new book, new set collection of essays was really helpful for me at the end of my writing because it thinks a lot about loss, and as you know, that is a theme that recurs in in this book. And so her essays, some of which have been published before, have been important to me. And then Hanif Abdurraqib, who is a prolific writer and poet, the way that he is able to draw you into the feeling of a scene through the organization of his writing, the way that he creates tempo, the way that he creates arc, the way that he is able to craft a story so that you feel emotionally tied to it is something that I aspire towards. And to the extent I was able to achieve that in the book, I'm grateful for his for his example. But there's so many folks. I mean, you know, brilliant writers. Dana Williams, who wrote Toni Morrison At Random, was a part of some of the writing groups I was in. I learned so much from her and how she was using Morrison's letters and archival sources. So there are lots of folks a longer list than I can name, but I spend a lot of time thinking about craft for this book and trying to find inspiration. And I hope that the book is both informed by life writing, but then also informed by writing about culture and thinking about why, how to invite readers into a cultural moment in a way that's legible and helps them to feel like they're there. And so, you know, being able to hear the music. My mom read an early version of the book, and she said I stopped and had to listen to this song that you were talking about, and it was just like you described, and so that was. I said, "Okay, if my mom liked it, then I okay, I did my job."

Kate Carpenter
That's fantastic. What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
So I was in a writing seminar with the brilliant Imani Perry, and some advice that she gave was that all of us have unique voices, and that in my case, my training, my education, the different writing that I've done helps to cultivate that voice. But that in order to get at it, to really have it speak, you have to be honest, and often that means taking on questions that you might want to shy away from, or realities that you may not want to broadcast, and so I did have some complicated feelings about some of the things I revealed about the women, just because they're so painful, and part of why I decided to include those bits in the book is because I think it both opens up the world that they lived in in a more transparent way, and it also allowed me to have more honesty with my voice as a writer. And to hide those things, I understand is protective of the figures in certain ways, but I also think it diminishes our understanding of really what they had to go through to become the figures that we know today, and so that was a great bit of writing, a great bit of advice that she gave me, and you know echoes with some other things that James Baldwin and others have written over time.

Kate Carpenter
Well, okay, as we're talking, the book is not not quite out yet, so I'm I'm sure you're very excited and and focused on that, and I always feel a little guilty asking this, and yet I am very curious. So I will ask anyway. Do you have another project you're looking toward? How are you thinking about what comes next?

Soyica Diggs Colbert
So some things are percolating. I haven't put my finger on what the next book will be yet, but there is some curiosity that I have about the next phase of these women's lives, and so there might be a sequel to some of the the things that I write in the Village Gate. But then I'm also curious about how we understand evidence given where we are in the world today, and all of the conversations around artificial intelligence and how we understand information and its relationship to knowledge. So that's much more more abstract concept. But the book that I'm toying around with is called Black Ghosts, and it's thinking about how Black history and culture have always haunted our understanding of the archive, our understanding of information, our understanding of figures, and how there might be some long history of information there that could help us deal with our current moment and our ambiguities around sources. So we'll see how it goes. But for now, you're right. I am. I am really focusing on the launch of this book, and whether it's my next book or the book thereafter, I'm sure there'll be some more life writing in my future.

Kate Carpenter
Well, I'm glad to hear all of the above. It sounds like a great potential project, and I loved your life writing in this one. So I look forward to seeing more, Dr. Colbert. Thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for talking about your research and your writing process.

Soyica Diggs Colbert
Thank you. It's my pleasure

Kate Carpenter
Thanks again to Soyica Diggs Colbert for joining me on the Drafting the Past episode. Thanks to you for listening. You’ll can buy copies of Freedom’s Gate and Radical Vision in the show notes, and you’ll also find links to the other books and writers that Soyica recommended in the show.
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