The Archives of Ancestors

What are you left with after the death of an ancestor? These two authors reflect on this question through methods as varied as archive, poetry, and narrative. In Tisa Bryant’s Residual, she retrieves and catalogs what remains of her mother’s home after her passing. Across archive, biography, and poems, Bryant sketches her family and matrilineage. In Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Finding Sarah and Mary: Unraveling African American Genealogy from the Ground Up, she weaves and reweaves data and details, anchored by two women: a paternal ancestor and a maternal ancestor. Combining memoir, family lore, and history, Jones Royster offers a view of the lives and legacy of ordinary folk. These two authors and esteemed scholars will discuss memory, home, and cultural inheritances. 

Purchase your book from Brave + Kind, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Decatur Book Festival.

This event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required, and seating is first come, first served. Signing information: Signing time: 12:30 PM

Signing location: DeKalb History Center North Lawn (Ponce de Leon side)

About the Authors

Tisa Bryant is the author of Residual, a nonfiction assemblage of the interiors of grief, the home as archive, and the mystery of mothers, published in 2026 from Nightboat Books with the support of a publishing subvention grant from the Tara Coyt Publishing Fund. Her first book, Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on the mythologies of Black presences in film, literature, and visual art, was reissued by Wave Books in 2024. She is coeditor of the three-volume, cross-referenced literary journal The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborated with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book, a series of visual mixtapes and love letters to Black people and Black culture, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; an editor of hybrid writing for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora; and editor for The Deep West Assembly, a monograph of recent works by filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem, for artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Laylah Ali, Suné Woods, and Jaime Cortez, and in various anthologies and publications. She is Associate Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Jacqueline Jones Royster is professor emerita at the Ohio State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author and coauthor of several books, including Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women; Making the World a Better Place: African American Women Advocates, Activists, and Leaders, 1773–1900; Feminist Rhetorical Studies: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies; and Double-Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters. She is also the editor of Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900 and Critical Inquiries: Readings on Culture and Community. Her new book is Finding Sarah and Mary: Unraveling African American Genealogy from the Ground Up. She lives and writes in Atlanta.

About the Moderator

Holly A. Smith serves as the College Archivist at Spelman College. Previously she served as African American Materials Specialist in the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. in History and Black Studies from The College of William and Mary, an M.A. in History from Yale University, and her M.S. in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in Archival Management, from Simmons College. Ms. Smith has served as chair of the Society of American Archivists Diversity Committee, and co-chair of the Women’s Collections Roundtable. Additionally, she is the proud co-author of the article “This [Black] Woman’s Work: Exploring Archival Projects that Embrace the Identity of the Memory Worker” (KULA Journal) and author of the pieces “Radical Love: Documenting Underrepresented Communities Using Principles of Radical Empathy” (Journal for the Society of North Carolina Archivists) and “Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter: Black Feminist Archival Practice and The Spelman College Archives” (The Black Scholar 52:2). Ms. Smith has had the pleasure of speaking on panels about HBCU archives, digital collections, and the papers of lesbian feminist activist/writer Audre Lorde. She is passionate about community archives and archival advocacy related to collections for historically under documented communities.