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In The Telling: Black Family Podcast
This season, there is no single storyline or theme, just an open table where memory meets meaning and where telling becomes a way to keep and hold one another. As always, we span the global black world with intimate conversations about family, whether blood or chosen. Our guests share the stories, objects, and rituals that hold their lives together, from migration and matriarchs to recipes, photos, and hard-won truths.
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Contact us if you would like to be a guest on the show.
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Original music by Sean Bempong
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Listen/Watch below or on:
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Season 5
This episode is a story about family, memory, and the places where we once felt safest without fully understanding why. Through memories of roller-coaster rides shared with her father and extended family, writer Lyzette Wanzer revisits a childhood shaped by laughter, ritual, and belonging—moments that helped define what family felt like at its best.
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Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. Her work appears in over thirty literary journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Library Journal named her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives … a Top 10 Best Social Sciences Book. Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Her research interests include professional development for creative writers, Black feminism, critical race theory, and the lyrical essay form. Lyzette is a contributor to LYRIC ESSAY AS RESISTANCE: Truth from the Margins and THE CHALK CIRCLE: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays.
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You can learn more about Lyzette and her work by visiting her website: www.lyzettewanzermfa.com
In this episode of In the Telling, hosts Miranda and Steven sit down with The Beards for a warm, grounded conversation about how families turn everyday life into lasting legacy. Martha Perine Beard (Mobile, AL) and Savoyd Beard (Haywood County, TN → Memphis) reflect on growing up in the segregated South and the family ethic that shaped their lives—study hard, show up, and bring someone with you. Martha traces a path from a mother who fiercely protected her study time to scholarships at Clark and Washington University in St. Louis, and ultimately to breaking barriers at the Federal Reserve.
Savoyd shares how an aunt’s nudge toward band—and a relentless practice routine—carried him from farm roads to Washington, D.C., performing with the U.S. Army Band. Together they talk about faith, extended kin, and keeping family land; about caretaking elders and supporting each other’s callings; and about passing lessons forward: remove “can’t,” lead with character and preparation, and record your own history—names, dates, stories—so the next generation can stand on it. It’s a warm, clear-eyed conversation about love, work, and the everyday choices that become legacy.
In this season’s premiere episode of In the Telling, Miranda Mims and Steven G. Fullwood speak with renowned Zimbabwean scholar, archivist, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, and author Joyce Jenje Makwenda, whose four decades of work document Zimbabwe’s early urban life through music, women’s histories, and community storytelling.
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Raised by six parents across Gwatemba, Bulawayo, and Mbare, Joyce reflects on her grandparents’ house of ancestors and the kitchen as a sacred space built by women—where storytelling, childbirth, and remembrance intertwined to preserve family and culture. She traces how memory travels from pre-colonial hearths to township streets where jazz played by the gate, revealing how home, heritage, and everyday acts of resilience shape collective history. Her message is clear and enduring: “Documentation, documentation, documentation.”
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Selected Music from the album Four Daughters: Muchato Kumusha
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To learn more about our guest and her work, check out the following links:
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​Unpacking significance of the kitchen: https://www.heraldonline.co.zw/unpacking-significance-of-the-kitchen/
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​Zimbabwe Township Music Documentary: https://youtu.be/K-IAOlM250g?si=qKxxC7YJQfH3l4A1