Author Talk with Francesca Royster of Black Country Music

Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on African American Literature, Queer Writers of Color, and Writing About Music. She received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Her written work spans Shakespeare, Black country music performers and fans, Prince, Beyoncé, Tracy Chapman, queer utopias, and chosen family, among other topics.

Her books include Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press, 2022), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams/Overlook Press, 2023).

Black Country Music received several 2023 honors: the Ralph Gleason Music Books First Prize from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, the Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society, and the Woody Guthrie Award for Most Outstanding Book on Popular Music from the International Association of Popular Music Studies–US.

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