Busy Being Black with Joshua Rivers
The award-winning podcast that centres and celebrates queer Black liveliness.
Episodes
June 24, 2026 • 58 mins
I sat down with award-winning author Brandon Taylor live at Brixton House Theatre to mark the UK launch of his latest novel, Minor Black Figures. Our conversation explores what happens when Black artists resist the demands of the always-on attention economy to instead embrace the archives, tend to our cultural inheritances and allow ourselves—and the characters in our art—the messy complexities we are so often encourage...
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April 24, 2026 • 61 mins
As we bear witness to the destruction of our world and kin through handheld technologies designed as slot machines, and increasingly disoriented by the hourly oscillations between the cannibal horror and unutterable awe of being human in 2026, Minna Salami reminds us that we won’t build new worlds with the same words that built this one. Read that again, friends.
With her full-bodied philosophy, sensuous knowledge,...
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April 18, 2026 • 54 mins
My bodacious conversation with theatre-maker and cosmological enchantress Candice D'Meza opens with my poem, Our Life Together. Inspired by an exchange between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, the poem is a fitting expression of the ways Black artists think, feel and create across time and space to build the worlds we need now.
Candice D'Meza builds liberated worlds through art, cosmology and the Imagination Institute, where she ...
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March 25, 2026 • 45 mins
Poet and author Dean Atta returns to Busy Being Black to share how therapy, memoir-writing and entering into his "big man stage" have transformed his relationship with his mental health, creativity and self-acceptance. The episode opens with a joint reading of Dean's poem "Two Black Boys in Paradise"—the poem that inspired the BAFTA-winning animation of the same name—and closes with Dean reading "On Days When" from his ...
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March 21, 2026 • 37 mins
Busy Being Black returns on Tuesday 24 March 2026 with a new conversation between me Dean Atta, who recently won a BAFTA for Two Black Boys in Paradise. Today, in honour of World Poetry Day, I’m resurfacing our 2018 conversation in which we explore recovery and intimacy, desire and vulnerability and the role of poetry in bringing us closer to ourselves, to each other and to people who are no longer with us.
This episode incl...
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March 9, 2026 • 54 mins
Art is a vital mechanism through which we process grief and sustain life. In times of intense discord, denying our impulse to create often results in destructive behaviours. Artist and writer Rosel Jackson Stern offers a gentle provocation to anyone feeling paralysed by the current geopolitical climate: find and nurture even the tiniest moments of joy.
By anchoring life in joy, Rosel has built an artistic and spiritual practice t...
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October 21, 2025 • 58 mins
Today marks eight years since Busy Being Black first came to life: on 21 October 2017, I produced and hosted an event called Forbidden Fruits, anchored by a conversation about love, intimacy and belonging among queer Black men. I couldn't have known in that moment how much I would need this space.
Ben Ellis is a poet—and a poet in the way James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and René Ménil meant it: one ordained to dive into the unc...
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September 21, 2025 • 58 mins
A tender meditation on grief, healing and courage with multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Boswell, who creates portals that return us to our miraculous hearts.
If you'd like to see the art we discuss in this conversation, you can watch this episode on @busybeingblacktube.
The Black Marvellous: a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude & life.
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If this...
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June 25, 2025 • 58 mins
Inspired by Afrosurrealism, surrealist philosophy and the archetypal imagination, the Black Marvellous is a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude and life.
Who better than Mojisola Adebayo to remind us of the adventure and irreverence of Black artistry, during and beyond times of crisis?
In this conversation, which originally aired in February 2023, Mojisola takes...
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December 30, 2024 • 46 mins
You’ll no doubt have heard of and read Kuchenga Shenjé's debut novel, The Library Thief, which brings together her passions for history, mystery and rebels; and you’re likely to have felt the warmth and humour of her writing in publications like British Vogue and Stylist. In our conversation, we explore how she came to the transformative decision to pursue sobriety, her hodgepodge approach to her spirituality and spirit...
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December 9, 2024 • 56 mins
I’ve been invigorated by Legacy Russell’s ongoing inquiries into how we come alive together. Whether she’s encouraging us to think expansively about the connection between marine life and Black agency under duress, or pointing us towards the liberatory possibilities at the intersection of our bodies, genders and technologies, her work is evidence of her desire and drive to live in a world in which Black folks thri...
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November 25, 2024 • 53 mins
How do we engage with and sustain Black cultures, communities, histories and futures outside of the extractive infrastructures and institutions that thrive on Black death and disposability? Maleke Glee is a curator and scholar of cultural sustainability who offers go-go music as a wonderful working example: a genre and sonic landscape native to Washington DC, with an insular economy that supports self-taught and formerly incarcerat...
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August 26, 2024 • 55 mins
Angelina Namiba serves as a possibility model for effective and sustained engagement with those vulnerable to HIV. When she was diagnosed in the early 90s, she immediately set to work to understand why Black women were being left out of national efforts to combat the spread of the virus, and she participated in and assembled groups of women committed to raising the voices of women living with HIV globally.
She is a titan within En...
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August 12, 2024 • 57 mins
Dennis Carney is an elder whose respect among our community needs no justification nor explanation. Among much else, he led the now-closed Black Gay and Lesbian Centre in Brixton, and he has worked for 25 years as a therapeutic practitioner, supporting Black gay men to love themselves more deeply, hold their emotions more gently and show up in the world more fully.
We explore his involvement in the Stop Murder Music campaign, the...
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August 5, 2024 • 63 mins
We are living through a particularly tense geopolitical moment and I have found myself in a near-constant state of anger over the past couple of weeks. I have had to work very hard to ensure the language and energy I put out into the world is not only angry, but productive. To help me – and us – show up with compassion and clarity in this moment, I’m resurfacing my 2019 conversation with communications provocateur...
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July 30, 2024 • 46 mins
I’m thrilled to share this conversation with British Nigerian writer and curator Irenosen Okojie, which was recorded at the Garden Cinema in London after a private viewing of Blitz Bazawule’s new musical adaption of The Color Purple. Our conversation was one of many events that took place as part of Irenosen’s Black to the Future festival, an afrofuturist celebration of outstanding Black artists and a growing spac...
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July 16, 2024 • 61 mins
The urgent problems of our time require collective engagement with the generative offerings of our imaginations. Whether our work calls us to challenge the extractive practices ruining our planet, educate a new generation of thinkers and creators, or to put out into the burning world poetry that awakens and enlivens, each of us carries – and feels the weight of – a responsibility to help fashion a better future.
My gue...
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October 27, 2023 • 50 mins
Julian Joseph is acclaimed as one of the finest jazz musicians to emerge this side of the Atlantic and his career has been characterised by many ground-breaking advances: he was the first Black British jazz musician to host a series of concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall and the first to headline a late-night televised performance at the BBC Proms.
We explore how jazz and life are both animated by the art of improvisation, the...
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October 3, 2023 • 63 mins
Questioning and then breaching our limits is a salient and consequential concern — and a quest Elijah McKinnon undertakes as founder and executive diva of Open Television (OTV), a platform and media incubator for intersectional storytelling. Elijah’s insights into how their imagination is supported and encouraged by their pragmatism made me think and reflect on how I engage with my own; and we wax lyrical on a shared de...
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August 2, 2023 • 27 mins
Help me shape the future of Busy Being Black by filling out this short listener survey: https://forms.gle/y7y3iQ7RPievyGFP8
Kokomo City takes up a seemingly simple mantle — to present the stories of four Black transgender sex workers: Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell, Dominique Silver and the late Koko Da Doll, who share their reflections on desire, confronting taboos, gender’s many meanings and the ways Black trans wome...
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