Decatur Book Festival 2026- The Archives of Ancestors with Tisa Bryant and Jacqueline Jones Royster

From the venue:

About the Authors

Tisa Bryant is the author of Residual, a nonfiction assemblage of the interiors of grief, the home as archive, and the mystery of mothers, published in 2026 from Nightboat Books with the support of a publishing subvention grant from the Tara Coyt Publishing Fund. Her first book, Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on the mythologies of Black presences in film, literature, and visual art, was reissued by Wave Books in 2024. She is coeditor of the three-volume, cross-referenced literary journal The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborated with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book, a series of visual mixtapes and love letters to Black people and Black culture, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; an editor of hybrid writing for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora; and editor for The Deep West Assembly, a monograph of recent works by filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem, for artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Laylah Ali, Suné Woods, and Jaime Cortez, and in various anthologies and publications. She is Associate Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is professor emerita at the Ohio State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author and coauthor of several books, including Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women; Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773–1900; Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies; and Double-Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters. She is also the editor of Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 and Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community. Her new book is Finding Sarah and Mary: Unraveling African American Genealogy from the Ground Up. She lives and writes in Atlanta.