It’s a Great Time for Black Creatives: An Interview with Black Girl Magic Magazine’s Founder

The field of Black Speculative Fiction is blowing up right now, with new publications that feature Black creators joining established journals and book publishers. Together, old and new provide more opportunities for authors to have their short stories given the time and space they deserve. To explore the growth in the industry, we interviewed Kenesha Williams, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Black Girl Magic Literary Magazine. The magazine addresses the need for diverse, non-majority writers, particularly Black women writers, in speculative fiction. Their 4th issue is available now. We talked about Lemonade, cover art, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Fireside Fiction report. Black Nerd Problems: What’s your favorite song or scene from Lemonade. And “I prefer Rhianna’s Anti” is a valid answer. Is there a song there that fits to your style of activism? Kenesha Williams: My favorite song from Lemonade has to be “Don’t Hurt Yourself” with “Freedom” coming in at a very close second, almost a tie. In fact I wrote an article about the song and it’s parallels to Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” on Medium, but never hit Publish because I felt like there were so many think pieces out on the album. I had written it a week after the album dropped, after 1 million articles have been written on it and then the Lemonade syllabus came out. I feel like the song, like Hurston’s story, is one about a singular marriage but it’s infused with universal truths about the relationship dynamic…