Walker Previews ‘Magically Black and Other Essays’ with LA Review of Books

Writing, Literature, and Publishing (WLP) professor and award-winning author Jerald Walker discussed his new book with Nicole Graev Lipson, an alum of the Creative Writing MFA program and former student of Walker.

This book is about racial identity: how it’s formed and created, how you can learn to be a race, and how you can unlearn what race means through the course of a lifetime. This is one of my life’s enduring questions that I can’t seem to get a complete handle on.

Magically Black and Other Essays publishes this month, and an essay from the book will be featured in the 2024 edition of Best American Essays, which will be Walker’s sixth essay included in the series.

Read the interview.