Current Events
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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
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Hope Chest: Ep. 9
A version of this essay was adapted for my podcast, Hope Chest. You can listen to the audio version here. On occasion, as an artist, you are called away, into a space where creatives make covenant to triage the wounds that the wider world inflicts and, by God, on each occasion, we bend a wormhole… Continue reading
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Like a Good Neighbor.
Apartment dwelling culture cannot be easily explained to the uninitiated. There is, after all, more than one reason we call apartment buildings and the units within them a complex. A complex does not begin as a community; that must be cultivated by tenants who intend to stay awhile. Those who do not speak, who… Continue reading
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Hope Chest: Ep. 8
Hope Chest is a collection of deeply personal audio-essays written mother-to-daughter. Listen to every episode at Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. Below is the text for Episode 8: As for Me and This House (And Senate). Listen along here. In nearly every election held since you were born, I’ve brought you into the voting booth with me. This election… Continue reading
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In the absence of justice, a scent.
(for Robert Godwin, Sr.) The scent of an old Black man is aftershave the dry flaking skin of an undergreased scalp maybe, when the weather is warm, the must of an armpit, slightly overripe and sometimes liquor, hard candy, a poor breath-mask of stale mints and sometimes tobacco in the form of mentholated cigarettes or… Continue reading
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(Don’t) Forget Paris.
(Listen to the audio version of this essay via my new podcast, https://soundcloud.com/hopechestpodcast/ep-3-dont-forget-paris. Subscribe at iTunes and please rate and review!) 1. I do not have many romantic stories to tell you. Even the yarn about how your father and I managed to spend four days traipsing the cobblestoned arrondissements of Paris is an unsentimental… Continue reading
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Hope Chest: A New Podcast by Stacia Brown.
Hope chest (n.) : a young woman’s accumulation of clothes and domestic furnishings (as silver and linen) kept in anticipation of her marriage; also : a chest for such an accumulation, Merriam-Webster.com My mother first told me what a hope chest was when I was a teenager. She said women who wanted to marry sometimes… Continue reading
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Private Black Motherhood and Public White Protest.
1. Mother: What is a woman? Child: A woman is… um… hmm… It is a trick question. The definition will always differ, depending on the person being asked to provide it. You will define womanhood differently than I, for instance. It will mean something else by the time you become one than it meant almost… Continue reading
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Sackcloth Farewell, Inauguration of Ashes.
It is just that wistfulness is no longer a luxury I can afford. It isn’t personal. The man, his wife, her mother, their daughters: in my life, there has been no Black family who has been more beautiful more consistently, under an eight-year glare of a chronically dissatisfied public. In my lifetime, I’ve not seen… Continue reading
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Surviving the Game.
Each generation faces crises that convince them the world will end while they are still alive to witness it and when that end feels nearest, the people turn in toward themselves and face their God (or the Exceeding Nothingness they believe awaits). They slide the Great Abacus of Days, take account of their stewardship over… 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.