Keith Corbin, Will Jawando & D. Watkins: A Conversation

D. Watkins is the New York Times bestselling author of The Beast Side, The Cook Up, Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised, and We Speak for Ourselves. He is editor at large for Salon and his work has been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and other publications. At 9 years old, Watkins had three concerns in life: picking his dad’s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. At the time, his home of East Baltimore was a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic. Like many boys around him, Watkins was thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood meant surviving by slinging crack and finding oneself on the right side of a pistol. For 30 years, Watkins was forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experienced or risk losing himself entirely. In Black Boy Smile: A Memoir in Moments (Legacy Lit), he harnesses these experiences to tell the story of how he matured into the man he is today – beloved author, college professor, editor, and devoted husband and father. Black Boy Smile is the story of a Black boy who healed.

Keith Corbin is the James Beard Award-nominated executive chef and co-owner of Alta Adams in Los Angeles, named one of the best restaurants in the country by Esquire, Thrillist, and the Los Angeles Times, and he has been cooking his entire life. Born on the home turf of the notorious Grape Street Crips in 1980s Watts, Los Angeles, Corbin started cooking crack at age 13. He became so skilled that he was flown across the country to cook for drug operations in other cities. His criminal enterprises eventually caught up with him and he spent years in California’s most notorious maximum security prisons, where he witnessed the resourcefulness of other inmates who made kimchi out of leftover vegetables and tamales from ground-up Fritos. In time, he developed his own culinary palate and ingenuity. After his release from prison, Corbin got a job managing the kitchen at Loco, celebrity chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson’s fast food restaurant concept bringing inexpensive, quality food and good jobs to underserved neighborhoods – and was on his way. In California Soul: An American Epic of Cooking and Survival (Random House), Corbin talks about his cooking vision and takes readers inside the world of gangs, drug dealing, prison politics, and culinary achievement.

Will Jawando is an attorney, activist, community leader, and councilmember in Montgomery County, Maryland, a diverse community of more than one million residents. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Root, and on BET.com, and has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and on NPR, NBC News, and MTV. In My Seven Black Fathers: A Young Activist’s Memoir of Race, Family, and the Mentors Who Made Him Whole (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Jawando tells an affirmative story of hope and respect for men of color as he looks back on the relationships with the mentors that enabled him to thrive. A Black kid with a divorced white mother and a frayed relationship with his biological father, Jawando found in Mr. Williams, the rare Black male grade school teacher, someone who bolstered his self-esteem when he was being bullied. There is also Jay Fletcher, an openly gay colleague of his mother who got him off junk food and took him to his first play, and President Barack Obama, who made him his associate director of public engagement at the White House. Jawando writes that without the influence of these men, he would not be who he is today.