Tajja Isen & Phoebe Robinson: A Conversation

Phoebe Robinson is a stand-up comedian, writer, producer, actress, and publisher. She is best known as the co-creator and co-star of the hit podcast and series of TV specials 2 Dope Queens. She’s also the New York Times bestselling author of You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain and Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay. Additionally, Robinson has starred in the movies Ibiza and What Men Want, and was a moderator on Michelle Obama’s international Becoming book tour. In her collection Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays, the inaugural title from her imprint, Tiny Reparations Books, Robinson shares funny stories but also stories that might inspire rage – and action. She writes about her perspective on performative allyship, white guilt, and what happens when white people take space in cultural movements. She explores what it’s like to be a woman who doesn’t want kids living in a society where motherhood is the crowning achievement of a straight woman’s life. She also shares tales of her mom before visiting with Michelle Obama and how the lack of Black women in leadership positions fueled her to become the Black lady-boss of her dreams.

Tajja Isen is a writer, editor, and voice actor. Her essays and criticism have appeared in dozens of outlets across the United States and Canada, and she is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine, the former digital editor of The Walrus, and the co-editor of the essay anthology The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. She has also edited for Electric Literature. In the nine essays in her debut collection, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service (Atria/One Signal Publishers), Isen explores the absurdities of life in a world fluent in the language of social justice but not always committed to follow through. Some of My Best Friends takes on the cartoon industry’s pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law’s refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire. Braiding cultural criticism with her lived experience, she explores the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, and what we demand.