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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We’re moving soon.
You were born in a Grand Rapids hospital, a midwesterner by birth but not temperament. You spent infancy in Michigan — the full first year of your life — but Baltimore is where you have grown into a semi-autonomous girl. It is the only place you remember living. We have been back here, in the… Continue reading
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Hope Chest: Ep. 5
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it’s been over six months since I’ve produced a new episode of my Hope Chest podcast. For those new to it, Hope Chest is an audio essay series I started earlier this year. It mostly deals with parenting as a Black single woman. I write, narrate, record, and… 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
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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
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.
Stacia L. Brown 