Chantal James will discuss her novel None But the Righteous, which was lauded as "a deeply haunted novel that moves with calm and ruthless determination" by The Los Angeles Times. Prize-winning author Shannon Sanders will moderate the conversation. 

Chantal James lives in working class Black Washington, DC, and has been published across genres—as a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book reviewer—in such venues as Catapult, Paste Magazine, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, and more. Her honors include a Fulbright fellowship in creative writing to Morocco, a finalist position for the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction prize from the North Carolina Literary Review for 2019, and a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Her novel was one of Kirkus' 10 most anticipated fiction books of its year and one of Library Journal's top anticipated debuts of its winter as well as an Indie Next pick of the American Booksellers’ Association. She is a contributor to On the Ground, a weekly show on community FM radio centering on voices of resistance in DC carried nationally through the Pacifica network. A third-generation HBCU alumna, she is trained in the discipline of philosophy through her masters degree and supports chronically unhoused women as a grant writer.

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Joyland, and elsewhere, and has received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives near Washington, DC with her husband and three sons.