In Conversation: On Unfollow Me: Essays On Complicity

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in diversity and inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of race, power, and privilege, and delivered more than 200 workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area. In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. Her memoir-in-essays Unfollow Me: Essays On Complicity (Bloomsbury Publishing) retraces her steps in a collection of writings on race, authenticity, and ambition. Busby’s social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of racism, respectability politics, and all the places where fear masquerades as progress. Publishers Weekly called it “a stirring take on a young woman’s search for identity and the fight for racial equity.”

Tawnicia Ferguson Rowan is an assistant professor of English at Florida Memorial University, a licensed teacher in the Universal Foundation for Better Living, and the founder of Well-Written Words, LLC. She is a second-generation native of Miami and a proud alumna of two historically Black colleges and universities: Spelman College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, and the Interdenominational Theological Center, where she earned a Master of Divinity degree. She earned her Master of Arts degree in English from Vanderbilt University. She is passionate about good writing, spiritual activism, and womanist thought, and she is committed to uplifting people through literacy. She currently serves in the adult education ministry at the Universal Truth Center in Miami Gardens, Fla.