Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with Antonio Michael Downing, author of the 2021 memoir Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming, as well as the illustrated children’s book Stars in My Crown. For just about a year now he’s also been the host of CBC’s The Next Chapter, where every week he talks to authors and once in a while an opinionated bookseller, about books they want people to pay attention to. But he’s here with me today to talk about his first novel: Black Cherokee. It’s the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers, a girl growing up in South Carolina where her mixed ancestry leaves her struggling for acceptance amidst the Cherokee community where her grandmother raised her.

Antonio Michael Downing's literary journey into the South

Host Michael Tamblyn spoke with novelist Scott Alexander Howard, winner of the 2025 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and author of The Other Valley. It’s the story of Odile Ozanne, a young girl who lives in a small village in a valley. In the next valley over, in the west, there is an identical village where events from 20 years ago are taking place, and in the valley to the east there is another village where it’s 20 years in the future. Occasionally, and under the strictest controls and in a disguise rendering them unidentifiable, people will visit the other valleys, looking forward, or backward in time.

One day, visitors from the east—that is, from the future—are recognized by Odile, and she has to carry on pretending she hasn’t seen what she knows she saw.

Scott Alexander Howard on the border-crossings between present and past

Host Nathan Maharaj spoke with novelist Rob Franklin. His debut novel Great Black Hope is about a young man, named Smith, who gets arrested for cocaine possession on his way home from a party at the end of an oppressively hot New York summer. Smith is Black, and he’s queer; he’s also a Stanford graduate and his family back in Atlanta is, as they say, not without means. As Smith’s court date looms and he enters treatment for addiction, he’s grieving the sudden and tragic death of a friend.

Rob Franklin's upwardly-mobile, downwardly-spiraling Great Black Hope