A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South

A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South  editor CINELLE BARNES fell in love with a boy from the Carolinas, moved South with him, and immediately encountered the worst and the best The South has to offer. Committed to “making this place as big as it is,” she found 21 other writers of color, both established and emerging, who are also confronting the paradoxes that envelop the South. A Measure of Belonging is the space she held for their stories. Contributors IVELISSE RODRIGUEZ and DIANA CEJAS join us to talk about their experiences— the good, the bad, and the befuddling— of living down south. [rsvp required; see below]

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CINELLE BARNES is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, 2019), and the editor the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writes of Color on the New American South (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College.  She is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book on climate justice and the Philippine water crisis.
Author Website

IVELISSE RODRIGUEZ’s debut short story collection Love War Stories is a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. She is the founder and editor of an interview series focused on contemporary Puerto Rican writers published in Centro Voices. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Author Website

DIANA CEJAS  is a pediatric neurologist and writer in Durham, NC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in medical journals and literary magazines including The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Iowa Review, and Catapult, among others. She is currently working on a memoir that describes her life as a physician-patient. She spends her days off on her family’s farm gardening and tending to their honeybees.