Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between.
Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.
It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension.
In this book talk, Nolan will focus on the rich terrain of womanhood that she explores in the book: how we come to learn what it means to be a woman, how we use the project of perfecting our bodies to perform womanhood, how motherhood puts our understandings of race to the test, and how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence in order to participate in popular culture. She will also discuss the process of excavating her own memories and hard truths in order to write them, how she balanced vulnerability with privacy in her book, and how being a Black woman informs her voice as an author and speaker.
Savala Nolan is a writer, speaker, and lawyer. She is executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She and her writing have been featured in Vogue, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and more. She served as an advisor on the Peabody–winning podcast, The Promise. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
The host for tonight’s event is Colleen James. Colleen is a Professor and Program Coordinator in the School of Business at Conestoga College and the Founder and Principal Consultant of Divonify Inc.
There will be a live Q&A session at the end, so please bring your questions.
If you would like to purchase a copy of Savala's book, please check out, A Different Drummer Books website for ordering information.
Note: This program is virtual and is delivered through Zoom and Facebook Live
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