Today’s conversation is with writer and critic Dionne Ford. In addition to a number of pieces in popular and writerly venues, she is co-editor with Jill Strauss of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the role of study in creative writing, the place of memoir and storytelling in the study of Black life, and the intimacy and social significance of Black writing.