This episode features our conversation with Brianna Wheeler, which was live-streamed on November 16, 2024.
Brianna Wheeler covers cannabis, culture, food, film, parenting and local politics for print and web. She served as host, writer and producer of the Willamette Week news podcast, and is a frequent contributor to Portland City Cast. Her creative nonfiction work has appeared in The Nasiona, Midnight and Indigo, and has been featured in Medium’s Human Parts newsletter. Her first book, Altogether Different: A Memoir about Identity, Inheritance, and the Raid that Started the Civil War was published by Korza Books in 2023.
If you could choose between being Black and being white, what would you do?
As a child, Brianna Wheeler, the mixed-race descendant of Dangerfield Newby-first of John Brown's raiders to die at Harpers Ferry in their bid to end slavery-unconsciously chose whiteness, unaware that she had the choice at all. As an adult, following the deaths of her mother and grandmother, Brianna struggled with her own identity, convinced that her lasting legacy would be the rejection of her own Blackness.
Then, in 2020, a racial reckoning rekindled her connection to both her heritage and her grandmother's lifelong work of preserving the stories of Dangerfield and the rest of her ancestors, leading Brianna to confront both long-held family dynamics and her own place in history-from a new perspective.
A unique blend of memoir, creative nonfiction and illustration, Altogether Different untangles the complex connection between the stories we tell ourselves and the histories preserved for us.
To learn more about Brianna, please visit briannawheeler.com.
Find Brianna on Instagram: @briyonceflipy
Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread
Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/
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