Book Club: COME BY HERE with Neesha Powell-Ingabire
Our April 2025 Book Club Selection
While Rooted is a Mississippi-centric publication, our Bottom Reader Book Club encompasses the wider South—and I’m so glad. There is much to learn from our neighbors across the region. We share a common history and face many of the same socioeconomic, political, and climate-related challenges. Culturally, the Deep South has a lot in common. And yet, each community and micro-region (even within Mississippi) has its own set of particularities, its own sub-cultures. Expanding our understanding of the region and the stories it contains helps us to better understand our hometowns and communities. Somehow, we all fit together.
One thing that author Neesha Powell-Ingabire has in common with many of the Mississippians featured here is a complicated relationship with her hometown. Brunswick, Georgia gained notoriety in 2020 after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, by white vigilantes, one of whom was Powell-Ingabire’s high school classmate. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast, Powell-Ingabire’s debut collection of essays, is an excavation of their hometown’s history and their place in it.
I hope you join me on this field trip to coastal Georgia. Neesha will be joining us for the live discussion of Come By Here on Wednesday, April 30 at 7pm CT. Register now to join.
In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia's facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.
In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire's hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.
Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area's long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick's Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.
In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home's collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde's advice: "It is better to speak."
Neesha Powell-Ingabire (she/they) is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, community & cultural organizer, resource mobilizer, cat parent, spouse, and auntie living in Atlanta/occupied Muscogee territory. She reports on the justice movements of the Black, trans, queer, and Southern communities to which she belongs and writes essays to recover her own history and the histories of her ancestors and their ancestral homes.
Neesha's writings have been published in various online and print publications, including Harper's Bazaar, the Oxford American, Scalawag, and VICE. She recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Georgia College. Learn more about Neesha's work at neeshawrites.com. They currently live in Fairburn, GA.
Check out our upcoming book club picks!
May: No One Gets to Fall Apart with author Sarah LaBrie and moderator John Caleb Grenn
June: Split the Baby with (me!) Lauren Rhoades, moderator TBD
July: World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After with author Martha Park
Last April’s Book Club:
Rooted Book Club: HOW TO STAY MARRIED by Harrison Scott Key
"In HOW TO STAY MARRIED, Harrison takes his readers on an emotional roller coaster ride through the euphoric highs and plunging lows of his marriage; his self-deprecating humor and unflagging spirit keep us clinging on through every twist and turn."
Book Club Replay: HOW TO STAY MARRIED with Harrison Scott Key
In April, Harrison Scott Key joined our book club to talk about his heartbreaking and hilarious memoir How to Stay Married. I think we were all struck by how open and honest Harrison was about his life and writing. He talked to us about his writing process, why religion and spirituality is such an important piece of the book, and what it’s been like to have a deeply personal and vulnerable memoir out in the world.
I picked up my copy today and can't wait to dive in.
I am loving learning about all of these new-to-me writers and books, thanks to your direction and vision for Mississippi.
Thank you.