Arts In: Ladee Hubbard

As Keep St Pete Lit brings this year’s Writer in Residence to town, we share a conversation with last year’s award-winning author, Ladee Hubbard.

Ladee talks with Barbara St. Clair about her rollicking, imaginative novel, The Talented Ribkins, about a family of African Americans living in the South who have odd and unique superpowers. . .  like drawing maps and seeing colors no one else can see.

The inspiration for the book is an essay by W.E.B. DuBois, a story of a strangely-shaped potato and her grandfather defying odds to earn a PhD in chemistry and teach at St Pete College, at a time when that was a rare thing for an African American to do.

Ladee Hubbard talks about deciding to earn an MFA while raising three young children, and how Toni Morrison encouraged all her wild experiments with language as a student.

You can find out more about her work at ladeehubbard.com.

Check out the events around this year’s Keep St Pete Lit Writer in Residence and the annual SunLit Festival, celebrating reading and writing in Tampa Bay – keepstpetelit.org.