Winfrey, Hearst have Black journalists tell elders’ stories

NEW YORK, June 16, (AP): Oprah Winfrey and Hearst Magazines are teaming up for interviews that pair young Black journalists with elders who include civil rights activists, celebrities and others sharing some lessons learned in life.

The project, “Lift Every Voice,” will be featured on Winfrey’s OprahDaily.com website and in magazines like ELLE, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Runner’s World and Winfrey’s own O Quarterly.

Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Andre De Shields and the activist Claudette Colvin are among the people featured. While some material from earlier Hearst television stories is used, the interviewers are drawn primarily from the ranks of historic Black colleges and universities, with most of the portraits taken by Black photographers just starting in the field.

In one example, 94-year-old community activist Opal Lee, from Fort Worth, Texas, talks to Mariah Campbell, a journalism student at Texas Southern University, about efforts to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

Winfrey said she was inspired by her own memories of knowing poet Maya Angelou when Winfrey was young, and how Angelou stressed the importance of sharing stories from the time she grew up.

Beyond celebrities, the young journalists will talk to teachers, doctors, writers, lawyers, homemakers and others about their lives.

“All are essential stories that might have otherwise slipped into the white noise of history,” Winfrey said in a video introducing the series.

Some of the stories will debut on Tuesday, and all will be made available online on June 19. Winfrey will also host a virtual event talking to some of the participating journalists, at a time not yet set.

Readers will be asked to support the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Caucus & Center on Black Aging.

Meanwhile, Winfrey’s next book club pick is a debut novel set in Georgia at the end of the Civil War: Nathan Harris’ “The Sweetness of Water.”

“One of my great joys is finding a new author whose work I can share and support,” Winfrey said Tuesday in a statement. “I was captivated by the work of Nathan Harris and look forward to discussing this debut novel with all of his new readers.”

The 29-year-old Harris, whose book comes out Tuesday, has said he wanted to show what it was like in the South after slaves were emancipated. “The Sweetness of Water” takes place in the imaginary town of Old Ox, Georgia, and tells of two brothers, recently freed, who find work on a neighboring farm run by a man who believes his son has been killed in the war.

“I’m so thrilled and honored to be chosen by Oprah’s Book Club,” Harris, a University of Oregon graduate and a former Michener Center fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. “For a generation, Oprah has been a committed advocate for authors, elevating their work and enlivening the literary landscape. To join the ranks of her previous selections is to have a dream come true.” A discussion between Winfrey and Harris will air July 23 on Apple TV+.

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NEW YORK: Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump and one of his top advisers during his administration, has a book deal.

Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner’s book will come out in early 2022. Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write about everything from the Middle East to criminal justice reform to the pandemic.

“His book will be the definitive, thorough recounting of the administration — and the truth about what happened behind closed doors,” Broadside announced Tuesday.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Kushner was often at the center of the Trump administration’s policies — whether brokering the normalization of relationships between Israel and United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — the so-called Abraham Accords — or playing a key role in a criminal justice bill passed by Congress in 2018.

He has also been the subject of numerous controversies, whether for his financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest or for the administration’s widely criticized handling of COVID-19.

In April 2020, less than two months into the pandemic, Kushner labeled the White House response a “great success story,” dismissed “the eternal lockdown crowd” and also said: “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”

The signing of Kushner comes during an ongoing debate within the book industry over which Trump officials, notably Trump himself, can be taken on without starting a revolt at the publishing house.