Race
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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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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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Prince and Philando and Futures Untold.
1. “Don’t worry. I only want you to have some fun.” It depends on the mother. But some begin to lose themselves in the fleshy, post-birth folds around their waists, in the feeling of excess blood, decreasing and slowly recalibrating its flow, in adjusting to the less taxing burden of one body again, instead of… Continue reading
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For Alton. For Philando. For All.
1. He had a grin made of gold. Veneers once considered as hip as the compact discs he was selling. Remember the ’90s, when yellow gold was preferable to platinum and the cassette tape had yet to become entirely passé, but if you were still playing those when CDs were all the rage, you were… Continue reading
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Postcard from the Inside.
Dear Reader, Day upon day I awaken both thrilled and exhausted, my nights all beset by the disquiet of ideas and anxiety. As it turns out, I am no better at sleeping soundly when I am fulfilled than when I am frustrated. This is the life I had conditioned myself to avoid, convinced as I… 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.