Shifting Geographies of the Self: Margo Jefferson and Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Writer Margo Jefferson and poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley join BookRising host Bhakti Shringarpure to talk about their recent books which won the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023. The authors speak about crafting aesthetically innovative, genre-bending and political works. They also weigh in on particular challenges for Black women in the world of publishing and the importance of mentoring and camaraderie among writers.

Margo Jefferson is a writer who worked as a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and the New York Times, and her writing has appeared in several publications including Vogue, New York Magazine and New Republic. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her book Negroland was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and was winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson. And most recently, Margo was awarded the Rathbones Folio prize for her genre-bending work of non-fiction titled Constructing a Nervous System

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and filmmaker of Ghanaian heritage, born and raised in Essex, England. She was shortlisted for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2016 and received an Eric Gregory Award for her pamphlet Girl B, published as part of the New Generation African Poets series in 2017. She is an alumna of both the Barbican Young Poets and Octavia Poetry Collectives, and has held residencies internationally. In 2019, she was awarded a TECHNĒ scholarship for fully-funded doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London. Quiet is her 2022 her debut collection of poetry and which was also awarded the Rathbones Folio Prize only a week ago.

 Bhakti Shringarpure is the Creative Director of the Radical Books Collective.