Hear to Slay, a Luminary Original Podcast with Roxane Gay & Tressie McMillan Cottom returns for Season 2
New York, NY, June 30, 2020 - Luminary, a subscription podcast network, released the premiere of Season 2 of the hit podcast series, Hear To Slay, with co-hosts Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom today.
On Hear To Slay, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom offer incisive reads of the politics that shape the world we live in and the popular culture we consume. Season 2 slays even bigger, badder foes like fear, anger, and anxiety with conversations on protests and the global pandemic, plus reflections on love, togetherness, and Black joy.
In the premiere episode of Season 2, Roxane and Tressie welcome Rashad Robinson, who runs Color of Change, to discuss racial injustice and how his organization is positioned to create change for Black lives. Robinson is followed by a panel discussion with three people whose work often goes unrecognized in conversations about labor -- artist and pop-up restarateur Jazzy Harvey, harm reduction associate Jose Martinez, and sex educator Marla Renee Stewart.
The first season of Hear To Slay featured guests such as Stacey Abrams, Gabrielle Union, Ava DuVernay, Tina Tchen, OlaRonke Akinmowo, Eve Ewing, Ashley Nicole Black, Bozoma St. John and more.
About Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects.
About Tressie McMillan Cottom
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an award-winning Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society whose work has been recognized nationally and internationally for the urgency and depth of her incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race, and gender.
McMillan Cottom earned her doctorate from Emory University’s Laney Graduate School in sociology 2015. Her dissertation research formed the foundation for her first book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press 2016). Carol Anderson describes Lower Ed as “nuanced, carefully argued, and engagingly written” and “a powerful, chilling tale of what happens when profit-driven privatization of a public good latches on to systemic inequality and individual aspirations.”
With tens of thousands of readers amassed over years of writing and publishing, McMillan Cottom’s columns have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Dissent Magazine. She is also the author or co-editor of four books. Her most recent book, THICK: and Other Essays (The New Press 2019), is a critically acclaimed Amazon best-seller that situates Black women’s intellectual tradition at its center. THICK won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize and is shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction.
The New York Times writes that THICK is “sure to become a classic” and Dorothy Roberts compares reading it to “holding a mirror to your soul and to that of America.” As a writer, researcher and public intellectual, McMillan Cottom has appeared on Amanpour & Co., MSNBC, The Daily Show, and National Public Radio. Whether testifying before U.S. Senate Subcommittees on student loan debt, consulting with U.S. Senators or collaborating with leading progressive think tanks, McMillan Cottom brings rigor and craft to bear on wicked social problems.
Rebecca Traister has called McMillan Cottom one of “America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism.” In addition to teaching U.S. racial relations, digital sociology and sociology of higher education at VCU and developing the University’s “Race, Space, and Place Initiative”, McMillan Cottom co-hosts the nationally distributed podcast “Hear to Slay” with Roxane Gay.
Tressie McMillan Cottom lives in Richmond, Virginia where she supports radically progressive local candidates for public office, the Richmond Community Bail Fund and removing memorials to oppressive racist fictions.
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