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union in your best interest. From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Zinci-Cleman's essay collection Freedom bridges a complex time in American race relations, as they're called.

We see the Philly suburbs from unusual angles, a kaleidoscopic South Africa, and our own Northern California problems and veins of possibility

reflected in honest searching prose. With work beginning in 2014 at the beginning of what became

known as Black Lives Matter, crossing through the so-called reckoning of 2020 and on into this strange

deflationary survivalist time in American politics, this book reckons with the Afro-pessimist worldview, the intersection of American gender and

racial privilege slash oppression, and what it is to be a human, swimming along as the great

title movement of history move in and around us.

We're delighted to welcome Zinzie Clemens' director of the creative writing

program at UC Davis, author of the novel, What We Lose, and of course this new essay collection

freedom. Welcome. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. So there is a lot of atmospheric talk

about freedom, in part because it's this whole, hey, 250th birthday

of America kind of feeling. Why do you think it's important to be exploring the sort of question

of freedom at this time? Yeah, it's interesting how that happened, isn't it? I swear I didn't

time the books released that way. Maybe your publisher did.

Yeah, you know, they're quite happy about it.

It's, I mean, it's always been important to talk about freedom, I think, for black people, as I say in the book, the communities that I grew up in, the South African community, freedom was,

it was always a theme, and it was never fully achieved. And when I began writing this book in

...