-
Come read me elsewhere.
Hi! Just popping in to remind you that I’ve started a newsletter, where I’m writing about all the people places and things I consider home. I’ve been publishing there weekly for about six weeks now. Please consider joining me there and help me clear 100 followers (I’m at 89 right now). As incentive, here are… Continue reading
-
Thoughts on Affirmation and Action.
I didn’t attend what would be considered a competitive university. It was never an ambition of mine to do so. I just wanted to go somewhere artsy and far away. But my educational achievement started flagging early, in 6th grade, and frankly, it’s a wonder I recovered enough ground by my junior and senior years… Continue reading
-
Believe the Better.
“It’s been a lot of years. Really think you’re getting one past me?” —Beyonce I can tell you this: I am not unhappy. Not in that way that was overfamiliar, that aching way that twisted the sinew and clenched at the bone. I rarely despair in the new life I’ve built, not the way I… Continue reading
-
Hope Chest, Ep. 11 – Growing and Going: A Love Story
1. Even now, I’m not sure why I did it. I’d say it wasn’t like me but that would only be half-true. I’d forgotten what I was like—or perhaps I never quite knew—and by the time we got here, I was becoming something else altogether. That is often a function of relocating, of looking for… Continue reading
-
A Pandemic Romance Post-Mortem.
1. Anemics are always cold. It’s an affliction of extremities, of icicled fingers and toes, of lightheadedness after standing too long in a chilly concert hall or at a sweltering summer festival, of darkness crowding the corners of the eyes in warning: find a seat, drink cold water, or succumb to blacking out. Sometimes, when… Continue reading
-
What We Mean When We Say Amicable.
I don’t regret it which, I guess, is the unrefined gold. I don’t regret it because he was good to me, because for a time we were so happy, we would giggle in the middle of the day and drink each other in till we were full to bursting, unabashed and grateful for the grace… Continue reading
-
Lessons Collected of Settling Dust.
Nothing feels quite as we expect it to. At intervals, a mental pinching is required. We must be sure we did not dream what we lived. There were apocalyptic pockets: spots where suffering was disproportionate, whole families halved in a matter of hours, workers and students and childbearers whose entire ways of being were obliterated… Continue reading
-
The Year I Learned Not To Run.
In 2020, I made many swift transitions. I relocated, began and learned a new job, lost that job (but not employment altogether) and learned I would need to originate a new position within the company. I met a man in May. He sort of moved in* in August. We’ve quarantined together, along with my daughter,… Continue reading
-
Survival Will Not Be The Lesson.
The world has gone both cacophonous and quiet, both chaotic and eerily still. Each person’s experience is wildly disparate. Contagion calls both for unanimity and for splintering. If we are to live — not to stay alive, but to value life, not to test negative, but to live — we must all first decide that… Continue reading
about stacia
Stacia L. Brown was born in Lansing, MI at the very end of the 1970s. She grew up in Baltimore, MD–the county, not the city. She graduated from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in DC with a BA in English and worked a few office gigs, while trying to jump-start her writing career, before moving to New York for grad school.
At 27, she finished an MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. She spent the next six and a half years working as an adjunct writing professor first in Michigan at Grand Valley State, Kuyper College and Grand Rapids Community College, then in Maryland at The Community College of Baltimore County and, for one dazzling semester, at MICA, while also working as a freelance writer for various publications, including The Washington Post, where she currently serves as a weekly contributor, New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and others.
In 2010, she became a mother.
For a semi-complete list of Stacia’s online publications, visit her bylines page.
Her short story, “Be Longing,” was selected for publication in It’s All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family, and Friends (Doubleday/Harlem Moon 2009), edited by Marita Golden. Her poem, “Combat,” appears in Reverie: Midwest African American Literature. Her essay on adjuncting as a single mother appears in the Demeter Press title, Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy, edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson.
Stacia served as the 2013-14 Editorial Fellow for Community Engagement at Colorlines. In June 2015, she was part of the inaugural Thread at Yale class. She was a 2015 participant in Women’s Media Center’s Progressive Women’s Voices training program. She was a 2019 Tin House Scholar and a participant in the Cambridge Writers Workshop in Paris, also in 2019.
In addition to her work in print, Stacia is also an accomplished audio storyteller. In November 2015, Stacia became the creator and producer of Baltimore: The Rise of Charm City, a radio and podcast series that tells intergenerational stories of place and memory in Baltimore City. Baltimore: The Rise of Charm City is part of the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)’s 2015 Finding America: Localore project and is produced in partnership with WEAA 88.9.
She is the creator of Hope Chest, a collection of audio essays written to her daughter and present in podcast form at SoundCloud and Apple Podcasts. Hope Chest has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts and the Third Coast International Audio Festival podcast, Re:Sound. It was named one of Audible Feast’s Best New Podcasts of 2017. She also created and produces a micro-podcast for middle-grade book reviews, which her daughter narrates and hosts. It’s called Story on Stories.
In 2018, Stacia landed a gig at WAMU, as a producer of the NPR-syndicated daily news program, 1A. In 2020, she relocated from Maryland to North Carolina, where she produced radio and podcasts (including the incomparable Great Grief with Nnenna Freelon) for WUNC, North Carolina’s NPR station before moving onto other sonic endeavors. In 2022, she served as an advice columnist for Slate’s weekly parenting advice column, Care and Feeding.
Stacia resides in Durham with her amazing daughter Story.