Queen Sugar

Imagine, right? Imagine spending years building a production company that is entirely dedicated to championing female creators.

Yeah, a total passion project.

Exactly.

You build it from the ground up.

But if you look at this announcement through the lens of what is happening in the rest of the industry on this exact same day, the layoffs, the hyper consolidation, the sheer panic of the streaming bubble bursting, you have to ask why this show?

Exactly.

What makes this specific project strong enough to cut through the noise of a completely contracting economy?

Right.

I'm your host, Daniel Ford.

We're joined on the show today by Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar and the recently published Friends and Family, out wherever books are sold from Pamela Dorman Books.

In Friends and Family, a friendship and a San Francisco neighborhood are disrupted after a traumatic encounter with local police.

Told from the perspective of Babs, the story, which begins with tensions already simmering between some of the characters, charts how a white family with an adopted black child react to the incident versus Babs' all-black family.

NPR's All Things Considered calls the book raw and frank and that Bazille wrestles with questions of race and allyship that are personal to both herself and her family.

Natalie Baszile is a writer and filmmaker.

Her previous novel, Queen Sugar, was adapted for seven television seasons by writer-director Ava DuVernay and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey.

We talk about that in the conversation ahead.

Okay.

Talk about Queen Sugar.

Yeah.

Oh, Queen Sugar.

I mean, that was the episode that started it all.

[sighs] I had long since given up directing dreams.

Like, my students are, are just...

They're, they're great.