A next generation of Linked Descendant storytellers feels compelled to face the hard truths of their ancestors’ involvement with slavery, to wrestle with the meaning and implications of the legacies of slavery, and to consider how to take restorative and reparative action.
Antoinette Broussard is a writer, researcher, and public speaker committed to the pursuit and documentation of her ancestral roots. Citadel Press published her first book, African American Holiday Traditions: Celebrating with Passion, Style, and Grace. The book pays homage to her African American culture and the traditions that grew out of the South, and from various other ethnicities in America, including Caribbean peoples, who melded with the African American race. She has contributed biographies to the African American National Biography, editor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Columbia Magazine, the Washington State Historical Society’s journal; Harlem of the West, Chronicle Books; The Baobab Tree, a journal of the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California, Inc.; BlackPast.org, a reference guide to African American history; Everything Has Its Place, an Anthology published by The San Leandro Writer’s Workshop; and Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation, published by Rutgers University Press. Antoinette’s eighteen years of research are the inspiration for her current work on a second book, Sweetwater: History Meets Personal Journey. More information can be found at http://www.antoinettebroussard.com.
Trina Michelle Robinson is based in San Francisco and is interested in exploring memory through video, archival materials, and text. Her video essay The Call has been exhibited in New York at the 2018 Governors Island Art Fair and the Wassaic Project’s 2018 summer exhibition Change of State, and in the Bay Area at Root Division and Southern Exposure. Her work has also screened at the Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia, NewFilmmakers NY at Film Anthology Archives, Crested Butte Film Festival in Colorado, and the Museum of the Moving Image during the Queens World Film Festival. Her performance and written pieces have been included in the Museum of the African Diaspora’s I’ve known Rivers project, and New Jersey Dramatists Which Way to America at the Jersey City Museum and Puffin Cultural Forum. She has worked in print and digital media as a managing editor and in production at California Sunday Magazine, The New Republic, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Vanity Fair, and content team at Slack. She also worked as a drama and spoken word poetry teaching artist at Women’s Project and Productions in New York.
Allison Thomas descends from enslavers dating to colonial Virginia (Carter/Gwynn/Braxton). In addition to editing Bittersweet, she serves on the Steering Committee of the Southern California CTTT chapter, and the Local Affiliate Working Group. She is writing about her own family as well. In normal times, is a film/theatre producer.
cousinsatthetable.wordpress.com 