This episode features Jaha Nailah Avery, UNC law school alum turned griot and professional storyteller. Jaha shares her journey from practicing law to freelance writing for outlets like Vanity Fair and The New York Times, explaining how she left a lucrative tech career to pursue meaningful storytelling work. She discusses her books, including Those Who Saw the Sun: African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South, and her role as a keeper of cultural memory. The conversation explores the importance of documenting Black history, the courage required to tell truth in dangerous times, and strategies for resistance through joy, creativity, and ancestral connection.

Sources:

Jaha Nailah Avery, I Heard: An American Journey (Penguin Random House, 2024)

Jaha Nailah Avery, Those Who Saw the Sun: African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South (Levine Querido, 2023).

A selection of Jaha's public works:

• “10 Black History Tours and Experiences in New Orleans” (Conde Nast, 2024)
• “As it Nears 25, ‘Eve’s Bayou’ is Still Radical—and Wonderful” (Vanity Fair, 2022)
• “Fashion on a Mission: Celebrating Black Life, One Thread At a Time” (Essence, 2026) [See also Jaha’s author’s page on Essence]
• “How the Peacock Chair Became a Symbol of Black Power and Liberation” (Architectural Digest, 2023)
• “Where Rihanna Got Her Style Groove” (New York Times, 2022)

In this powerful conversation, Dr. Rhon sits down with Tanasia Lea—Olympic-level triple jumper, equity consultant, birth doula, and mother—to explore what it means to live authentically at the intersection of ALL parts of who we are.

Tanasia shares her journey from New Haven to Williams College, through the corporate machine, and into transformation work that centers psychological agency, vitality, and permission to be fully human.

They discuss: 🔹 Navigating PWIs and white supremacy culture 🔹 The power of Africana Studies as a lens for understanding the world 🔹 Finding joy 🔹 The importance of surrounding yourself with people who trust you'll land well

"Everyone has agency—it's exercising that agency that provides vitality." —Tanasia Lea

Sources:

• Tanasia’s website:
• Tanasia’s feature in Athleta: “The Power of She”
• Make the Sonja Haynes Stone Center and Stone Written your philanthropic priority! https://linktr.ee/shscgiving

What does it mean to sit with the odyssey of Black history—and to carry it forward with rigor, spirit, and love?

In this powerful episode of Stone Written, Dr. Rhon is joined by historian, cultural critic, and filmmaker Dr. Claudrena N. Harold, Edward Stettinius Professor of History and Associate Dean at the University of Virginia, and featured speaker for the 2025 Genna Rae McNeil Black History Month Lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill.

From her early formation in Black institutions to her intellectual awakening at Temple University, Dr. Harold reflects on the beauty and majesty of African American history—and the joy that fuels her scholarship. Together, she and Dr. Rhon consider why Black history demands that we pause and dwell with it, not rush past it; how Black Studies remains both a struggle over definition and a space of boundless possibility; and how gospel music, creative form, and intergenerational lineage sustain Black freedom work across generations.

At the heart of this conversation is a meditation on Dr. Genna Rae McNeil’s legacy. Dr. Harold shares how McNeil’s work—grounded in historical rigor and spiritual depth—inspired her McNeil Lecture, “Truth Is on the Way: Gospel Music, Black Liberation, and the Politics of Freedom in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras.”

This episode is part testimony, part masterclass, part love letter to Black Studies. It is about Du Bois and Aretha. It is about protecting the institutions that transformed us. And it is about being keepers of the tradition in a time when truth itself is contested. Most of all, it is a reflection on what Mother Genna Rae McNeil taught us: that truth is on the way—and that we carry it forward together.

Sources:

• A selection of Dr. Harold’s work: When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hip Eras (2020); New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2016); and How Can I Ever Be Late (2017) and Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014) [short films co-directed with Kevin Everson].
• Select sources cited: Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970); Vincent Harding There is a River (1981); Bettye Collier-Thomas Sisters in the Struggle (2001); and Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995).
• Key artists invoked (add to your playlists if you haven’t already!): Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace (1972); John P. Kee, The Essential John P. Kee (2007); and Shirley Caesar, The Ultimate Collection (2011).

In this essential Black History Month conversation, Stone Written host Dr. Rhon sits down with Dr. Joshua Myers, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University and author of Of Black Study, to reflect on what Black intellectual traditions offer in our current political moment. Recorded in December 2024 but strikingly resonant today, the episode explores Black Studies not as abstraction or nostalgia, but as preparation for living, struggling, and organizing through crisis.

Grounded in the wisdom of ancestors such as June Jordan and Cedric Robinson, the episode interrogates the myths surrounding Black presence in the academy and calls for solidarity networks rooted in trust rather than transaction. Dr. Myers reminds us that Black Study lives everywhere—in our labor, our creativity, our relationships—and remains essential for navigating crisis toward collective liberation.

Sources:

• Select works by Joshua Myers: Of Black Study (Pluto Press, 2023); Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (Polity, 2021); We are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019); A Gathering Together (literary journal)
• Select texts mentioned in the episode: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd edition (UNC Press, 2021); Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2008); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 (Illinois Press, 2013); Anna Julia Cooper, A Vice from teh South; Erica R. Edwards, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (NYU Press, 2021); June Jordan, “Bringing Back the Person,” in Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from the Progressive, edited by Stacy Russo with a Foreword by Angela Davis (Litwin Books, 2014).
• Additional source: SNCC Legacy Project

In a deeply intimate conversation, Stone Written host Dr. Rhon (@DoctorRMB) sits down with grammy nominated American jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon to discuss her new book and album, exploring how jazz improvisation, deep listening, and ancestral presence shaped her journey through loss.

They reflect on grief’s non-linear nature, the healing power of creativity and community, and the ways memory, music, and everyday rituals open pathways from sorrow to hope.

Sources:

• Nnenna Freelon's website
• Nnenna's stunning guidebook, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss (Duke University Press, 2025)
• Nnenna's latest album, "Beneath the Skin" (Origin Records, 2025)
• Support the Sonja Haynes Stone Center (linktree)

On International Podcast Day (September 30th), Stone Written celebrates the power of storytelling at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. Host Dr. Rhon shares seven lessons she’s learned since stepping into her role at UNC–Chapel Hill, from why “those who know, know” isn’t enough, to how platforms like this one help us tell our story before someone else gets it wrong. This episode is a brief but timely love letter to the stories that shape us—and to the people who make them worth telling.

Sources:

• The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound by Siobhán McHugh (Columbia University Press, 2022)
• 100 Best Black Podcasts
• The Sonja Haynes Stone Center Linktree

Host Dr. Rhon speaks with artist Mark Anthony Brown Jr. and curator Ming Joi Washington about The Book of Mark a solo exhibition at the Stone Center that explores spirituality, ancestry, and diasporic practices through photography, sculpture, and time-based media.

The conversation covers their collaborative process and trust-building, the influence of Black church traditions, tensions between artistic integrity and the market, and efforts to make art accessible. The exhibition opens September 2025 and runs through the fall semester.

Sources:

• The Book of Mark exhibition catalog
• more about the artist, Mark Anthony Brown, Jr.
• more about the curator, Ming Joi Washington
• The Sonja Haynes Stone Center Linktree

Stone Center Director Dr. Rhon Manigault-Bryant (@DoctorRMB) opens Stone Written Season 2 on the 21st anniversary of the Stone Center building. Reflecting on the Stone Center's legacy and Toni Morrison’s powerful lessons on centering Black life, Dr. Rhon speaks to the urgent need to secure sustainable funding to expand research programs, fellowships, and student support.

Tune in for a pithy, but powerful conversation on creating a future that honors Black scholarship, creativity, and community — and learn how your support can make that vision possible. Join us in building the future we’ve always deserved.

Sources:

• The Sonja Haynes Stone Center website and linktree.
• Toni Morrison's novel Paradise (1997).
• Check out the full video and transcript of the 1998 “Toni Morrison Uncensored” Conversation with Morrison and Jana Wendt.
• Give to the Stone Center!