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Season 4, Episode 14: Mixed Race Writer Maria Olsen on the New Normal Family

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LIVE 2/13/17 5pm Eastern: I am excited to talk with Maria Olsen who is a children’s book author and now has a new non-fiction book: Not the Cleaver Family–The New Normal in Modern American Families (Tate Publishing, 2016).Don’t miss my talk with her.-Heidi Durrow

I interview Maria Olsen 2/13 5pm EASTERN. Tune in!

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Maria Leonard Olsen is a biracial woman whose parents were forbidden by law to marry in their home state of Maryland in the early 1960s. She is the mother of two children, a lawyer, journalist, radio talk show host (WPFW fm 89.3 in Washington, D.C.) and author of the children’s book, “Mommy, Why’s Your Skin So Brown?” Maria graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law, served in the Clinton Administration’s Justice Department, fostered newborn babies awaiting adoption, and has been on the boards of Children’s National Medical Center BOV, the Catholic Coalition for Special Education, GirlsUp and the Alzheimer’s Association of Greater Washington. She has written for The Washington Post,Washingtonian, Bethesda Magazine, Parenting, BabyTalk and Washington For Women. She lives in Fairhaven, Maryland.

 

Season 4, Episode 6: Award-winning Writer Lori Tharps, author of Same Family Different Colors

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lori tharps bookRECORDED 10/3/16: Don’t miss my conversation with award-winning writer Lori Tharps about her latest non-fiction book Same Family Different Colors.  Lori has been a leading voice in conversations about racial and cultural connection and difference. Listen to her talk about this much-needed book and the much-needed conversations it is sure to spark!  Listen here or download the episode on itunes.-Heidi Durrow

 

 

I talk with @loritharps about her new EXCELLENT book Same Family, Different Colors #multiracial

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lori collage black and whitelori tharps photoLori L. Tharps is an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University, an award-winning author, freelance journalist and popular speaker.

Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she left the Midwest in search of an authentic life experience beginning with four years at Smith College. (Technically, one of those years was spent studying abroad in Salamanca, Spain.). After graduating from Smith, with a B.A. in comparative education and Spanish, Tharps spent two years working on Madison Avenue at one of New York City’s top-ten public relations agencies. While there she worked tirelessly writing press releases and organizing press events for a certain candy company, powdered soup distributor and a well-known maker of dry toast. After realizing she’d never succeed as a PR executive, Tharps entered Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has been writing her way through the world ever since.

After graduation from Columbia, Tharps was a staff reporter at Vibe magazine and then a correspondent for Entertainment Weekly. She has written for Ms., Glamour, Suede, Vogue Black, Caribbean Life, Grid Philadelphia, xoJane.com and Essence magazines. She has also written for The Columbia Journalism Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, TheRoot.com and Ebony.com. Her work can also be read in the anthologies, Young Wives Tales: Stories of Love and Partnership (Seal Press), Naked: Black Women Bare All About their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips and Other Parts (Perigee), Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine (FSG) and Women: Images & Realities. A Multicultural Anthology (Avalon). Tharps is the author of two works of nonfiction – Hair Story:Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (St. Martin’s Press) and Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain (Atria) – and the novel, Substitute Me(Atria).

Currently Tharps lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children and she is working on a new book exploring the role of skin color politics in American families. Tharps doesn’t have a dog, but if she did, his name would be Otis. She has traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Tharps is (almost) fluent in Spanish and can say I love you in seven languages.

Season 3, Episode 25: Mari Naomi, Mixed-Race Cartoonist & Writer

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RECORDED 7/25/16: I loved taking with MariNaomi about her recently released book Turning Japanese! You can listen to the episode here or download it from itunes.  Also, you can pre-order her forthcoming book I Thought You Hated Me on Amazon here.-Heidi Durrow

Listen to @marinaomi talk about her newest book Turning Japanese. #multiracial

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mari collage

MariNaomi has been making memoir comics since 1997. She’s the author and illustrator of the SPACE Prize-winning Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011), the Eisner-nominated Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories(2dcloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014), the recently released Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016) and I Thought You Hated Me (Retrofit Comics, 2016), and her self-published Estrus Comics (1998 to 2009). Her work has appeared in over sixty print publications, and has been featured on numerous websites, such as The Rumpus, The Weeklings, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, Truth-out, XOJane, Buzzfeed, PEN America and more. Mari’s work on the Rumpus won a SPACE Prize and an honorable mention in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics 2013.

mari TurningJapaneseMariNaomi’s comics and paintings have been featured in such institutions as the De Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco’s Asian American Museum, and the Japanese American Museums in Los Angeles and San Jose. In 2011, Mari toured with the literary roadshow Sister Spit. She is the creator and curator of the Cartoonists of Color Database and the Queer Cartoonists Database.

Season 3, Episode 22: Award-winning Writer Dmae Roberts

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RECORDED 6/30/16: I was so excited to talk with my friend and writer-filmmaker Dmae Roberts about her wonderful new book The Letting Go Trilogies Stories of a Mixed Race Family.  Listen to her interview here or download it from itunes!-Heidi Durrow

Listen to my interview with @dmaeroberts about her excellent book! #multiracial

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dmae collage

dmae LettingGo-CoverDmae Roberts has recently completed her memoir book The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed Race Family which traces four decades of what it means to be a mixed-race adult who sometimes called herself A Secret Asian Woman. With her personal essays written over a ten-year period, Dmae Roberts journeys through biracial identity, Taiwan, sci-fi, and the trials of her interracial Taiwanese and Oklahoman family amid love, loss and letting go of past regrets and pain.

Dmae RobertsDmae Roberts is a writer/producer who received two Peabody Awards for her documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song and the Crossing East series. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and is a USA Fellow. She’s been published in Oregon Humanities, The Sun, Where Are You From? (Thymos Group) and Mothering in East Asian Communities (Demeter Press). Her book is The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family.

Mixed Experience History Month 2016

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mehm16 LarsenIt’s May and so our celebration of Mixed Experience History Month begins!

This the 10th year I’ve written this series and I have managed to find some really wonderful stories I hope you’ll enjoy.

I established Mixed Experience History Month in 2007 on my personal blog Light-skinned-ed Girl as a way of claiming a history and a voice that I felt had been denied me.

Part of the difficulty of claiming one’s identity in the Mixed experience is that we have no history.  Our stories have been written out of the texts to conform to what society has allowed us to say about our racial identities.  And usually that has either silenced our experience and/or simplified them.

It’s easy to celebrate Mixed Experience History Month!  Just follow along with the posts I’ll make each weekday in May profiling historical figures and events that relate to the Mixed experience.  This year I will be posting the blog profiles on my website The Mixed Experience in their entirety and in part on my personal blog with a click through link.

If you have ideas of people I should profile please email me at heidi(at)heidiwdurrow.com.  And remember this is history so I’m only looking for people to profile who have passed away!  P.S. Anybody know who this year’s badge features?–Heidi Durrow

Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for archived profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year’s profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,  2013, 2014, 2015.

Season 3, Episode 9: Traveling Abroad While Mixed & Other Musings

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the mixed experience by heidi durrowRECORDED 1/11/16: In the first episode of the season, I took the opportunity to muse a little bit about my recent trip to a remote island and my search for a “tribe” that looks like me.  Also, I share a recent blog post about my thoughts on the state of Multiracial America.  Is this a multiracial or biracial moment or is it a multiracial or biracial movement?  I say there is no multiracial movement (at least not yet).  What do you say?  Listen here or download the episode from itunes.-Heidi Durrow

Traveling abroad while #mixedrace or #multiracial & trying to find my “tribe”.

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Season 3, Episode 10: Author Sunil Yapa, Connecting Multiracial Experience with Global Identity

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Sunil Yapa Mixed Race WriterYour Hear is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

RECORDED 1/18/16: You know how you meet someone and you think: this person’s doing some really important work.  That was my impression of Sunil Yapa when I met him almost 8 years ago.  So it was particularly exciting to read his book, Your Heart Is A Muscle the Size of a Fist, and see the incredible reception it’s already getting.  You are going to love this book.  And you’ll love hearing more about his journey as a writer and the inspiration for this great story.  You can listen here or download the episode from itunes! – Heidi Durrow

Listen to @heididurrow interview with debut novelist phenom @sunilyapa  #multiracial #mixedrace

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Sunil Yapa on Heidi Durrow podcast

Sunil Yapa by Beowulf Sheehan

Sunil Yapa holds a bachelor’s degree in economic geography from Penn State University and an MFA from Hunter College. The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including time in Greece, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, China, and India, as well as London, Montreal, and New York City.

 

Season 3, Episode 12: Best-selling Author Shilpi Somaya Gowda, The Golden Son

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shilpi mixed experience text
The Golden Son

RECORDED 2/1/16 5PM: I was excited to speak with best-selling author Shilpi Somaya Gowda. She’s making a big splash with her second book, The Golden Son just published. Listen in to the interview here and learn about the inspiration for her second book and her journey as a writer or download the episode from itunes.-Heidi Durrow

Don’t miss @heididurrow interview of best-selling author @shilpigowda! #multiracial #mixedrace

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Shilpi Somoya Gowda on Heidi Durrow's podcastShilpi Somaya Gowda was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. In college, she spent a summer as a volunteer in an Indian orphanage, which seeded the idea for her first novel, Secret Daughter, published in 2010. It became an international bestseller, selling over 1 million copies worldwide, and has been translated into 24 languages. Her second novel, The Golden Son, is being published in late 2015-early 2016 around the world. Shilpi holds an MBA from Stanford University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain scholar. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Children’s Defense Fund, and is a Patron of Childhaven International, the organization for which she volunteered in India. She lives in California with her husband and children.

Mixed Experience History Month 2015: Sargent Johnson, artist

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mehm15_sargent_johnsonSargent Johnson (1887-1967) was a talented artist–painter, sculptor, and lithographer–known for abstract and early modern styles.  Born in 1887, he was the son of Anderson Johnson who was of Swedish descent, and Lizzie Jackson, who was African-American and Cherokee.  He started his art training at thirty-two at the California School of Fine Arts.  There, he won several prizes which would be the first of many more to come.  In 1926, he started showing his work at the Harmon Foundation. Johnson “worked with assurance in media ranging from carved wood to watercolor and metal, though his humanistic themes increasingly put him out of step with Bay Area art after 1950.  Johnson took part in the Federal Arts Project and received local commissions that included church murals and the still extant decoration of a relief sculpture on a vast outdoor wall behind San Francisco’s Washington High School.  Johnson taught briefly at Mills College but remained committed to his own art above all else,”  according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Johnson died of a heart attack in San Francisco in 1967 at the age of eighty.  More information about his art and life can be found here.

On being mixed, Johnson said: “I had a tough time in the early days.  They didn’t give me much of a chance.  They didn’t know who I was, but I had made up my mind that I was going to be an artist.”-Heidi Durrow

Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for archived profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year’s profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,  2013, 2014. Copyright 2015.

Mixed Experience History Month 2015: Edmonia Lewis, sculptor

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mehm15_edmonia_lewisEdmonia Lewis (approx. 1844-approx. 1911) was the first African-American/Native American woman to become a prominent American sculptor.

Born to a Native-American mother, and an African-American father, Lewis also used her Indian name “Wild Fire.”  She began her career at Oberlin College, and went on to study in Boston where, under the tutelage of a well-known sculptor, she met Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a Civil War commander, and sculpted him.  In 1865, she moved to Rome where her work drew considerable attention.  Upon her return to the United States several years later, she received substantial commissions for her portrait busts.  She was commissioned to create busts of Wadsworth Longfellow, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln among others.

050708_EdmoniaLewis2One of her most famous sculptures is Forever Free, a representation of an African-American couple in broken chains after Emancipation.  The driving force in Lewis’s life was perhaps an incident at Oberlin, when she was accused of poisoning two white classmates and brutally beaten by a vigilante mob that left her for dead.  According to A History of African American Artists  From 1792 to the Present: “Edmonia Lewis’s struggle was unique.  Like other artists, she had to establish her own aesthetic values and artistic identity–but she had to do this in the face of strong prejudices against women, African-Americans, and Native Americans.  In addition, she had to struggle with her suspicions, her inability to trust others–the scar tissue from the scandalous charges brought against her at Oberlin, her brutal beating, and her humiliating ‘expulsion’ (from Oberlin) despite exoneration.  Nothing like this was endured by any other artist of her day.” (p. 67)

On becoming an artist Lewis said: “I always wanted to make the form of things.  My mother was famous for inventing new patterns for embroidery, and perhaps the same thing is coming out of me.”–Heidi Durrow

Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for archived profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year’s profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,  2013, 2014. Copyright 2015.

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