Sindi-Leigh
McBride
McBride
Story Club
In March 2025, I started an online reading group. Meetings have been sporadic, but enriching. The motivation was very simple: to read short texts together, for pleasure. The mailing list is relatively large (+70 people) and growing steadily, but the gathering is usually intimate (10-15 people) with different participants each time. I like that everyone feels free to drop in and out based on availability and interest. If you'd like to join, please email me!
We usually begin by introducing ourselves by way of talking about what we have been reading; then I introduce the text and why I thought it would make for a good discussion; followed by a round of initial impressions and the conversation flows from there.
So far we have discussed the following stories:
“Recitatif” by Toni Morrison
"Drinking coffee elsewhere" by ZZ Packer
"Ten Protagonists" by Otessa Moshfegh
"Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan
I also collect reading recommendations from the group here
2024: A Light Lyricism. Reading Group and Literary Companion to When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Kunstmuseum Basel
In six public sessions, participants in the reading group will engage with a selection of texts by James Baldwin, Ken Bugul, Teju Cole, Akwaeke Emezi, Bernardine Evaristo, Andrea Lee, Maaza Men, Kwame McPherson, Johny Pitts, Koleka Putuma, Zadie Smith and Brandon Taylor.
In six public sessions, participants in the reading group will engage with a selection of texts by James Baldwin, Ken Bugul, Teju Cole, Akwaeke Emezi, Bernardine Evaristo, Andrea Lee, Maaza Men, Kwame McPherson, Johny Pitts, Koleka Putuma, Zadie Smith and Brandon Taylor.
2024: "A Vocabulary of the Senses" fellows talk series curated by Sinethemba Twalo for Creative Knowledge Resources project at the University of Cape Town.
The presentation thinks about anthropogenic climate change through a close reading of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022) which examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a Black feminist ‘poethical’ perspective; and Uhuru Phalafala's MINE MINE MINE (2023), a personal narration of her family's experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg.
Podcasts
2022: The Empty Chair podcast, discussing the history of Africa Is a Country and The Johannesburg Review of Books.
2021: Free City Radio podcast, discussing Medu Art Ensemble and legacies of artistic resistance in southern Africa.