A Consistent Creative Voice: Kassandra Timm and Black Lit Network

If there was uncertainty here and there about various aspects of the second phase of our Black Lit Network project, we knew one thing for sure: we would continue to work with our talented voice actor, Kassandra Timm. 

She narrated all 18 podcast episodes for us in fall 2025. With that work, she has now voiced more than 200 podcast episodes for our Remarkable Receptions podcast, in addition to providing narration for several audio compositions across other areas of the network. 

Timm has been a critical contributor to our ongoing efforts to make African American literary studies audible.

 
At a time when AI-generated voices are increasingly common, working with a live voice actor remains essential to our work. A human voice brings responsive intelligence to the project, knowing when to attend to tone, pacing, rhythm, and emphasis in ways that shape meaning. Timm takes cues from the directions we provide and, just as importantly, she offers creative interpretations that strengthen the scripts themselves.

Having a consistent voice across the project also helps establish a sense of identity. Moreover, beyond serving as our outward-facing voice, Timm is now one of the voices we hear internally as we write and revise episodes.

It’s sometimes easy to take the quality of Timm’s audio productions for granted. But then I listen to some of the recordings and narration I’ve produced on my own. Hearing my own and other amateur efforts quickly reminds me just how professional and high-quality Timm’s work truly is.

Working with Timm has also expanded how I think about the work I do. Who knew that producing African American literary history could involve working with scripts, collaborating with a voice actor, and treating audio as a core scholarly medium rather than a secondary supplement? There practices have reshaped how we imagine scholarship, reminding us that making Black literary studies audible is both an intellectual and creative endeavor.

Related:

• Working with Kassandra Timm, a talented voice actor

• Black Lit Network 

• Notes on the production of Remarkable Receptions

Related Works and the Literary Navigator

Sometimes it feels nearly invisible, but we accomplished quite a bit of technical work since August on the Literary Navigator site concerning the presentation of related materials. 

If you click on Beloved, you'll see "related publications" below, which connect to the novel in some way. Scroll further, and you'll see "related podcasts" with corresponding items, and below that, you'll see "related data gallery items" with corresponding episodes. Go further, and you'll see "related glossary items," and those too link to aspects of Beloved and Morrison. 

It all looks simple, and Dan Schreiber, the web developer for our DH Center, has been crucial to making it  all happen and appear seamless. What he's doing technically emerges from the conversations and planning that take place with him, Meg, and me. 

It also matters that Elizabeth Cali, various contributors, and I built up a body of content over the last two years. That content now serves as the "related" works. 

Related:

• Developing the Black Lit Network

Building African American Literary Projects Through Conversation

By the time we reached the second phase of this Mellon grant, Elizabeth Cali and I had already been in an eleven-year, nearly nonstop conversation about Black writers and artists, African American literary studies, and classroom approaches. The grant gave us an opportunity to extend some of those long-running conversations beyond ourselves and bring the ideas we had been developing to a broader public.

Beginning major African American literary studies projects with extended conversations may seem obvious. But perhaps it isn’t. The reality is that regular, extended conversations among specialists in our discipline are far rarer than we tend to acknowledge.

This is a structural problem. With relatively few scholars of African American literature in most English departments, it is not surprising that there are limited opportunities for scholars to gather regularly and talk through shared questions, methods, and project ideas.

Being a scholar of African American literature is typically structured as a solitary endeavor: teach your classes, write your single-authored articles and books, and move on. Under most circumstances, there is no built-in infrastructure for meeting once or twice per week with colleagues to discuss plans, processes, and shared intellectual concerns. Meetings themselves are discussed in negative terms, in part because they rarely focus on the substance of African American literary projects or collective intellectual work.

Meanwhile, beginning in 2014, my colleagues Tisha Brooks and Elizabeth Cali started meeting weekly to talk about African American literary studies and teaching, a practice that has continued ever since. As the number of colleagues and graduate students working in our area grew, Cali and I added an additional meeting devoted to planning special projects, including this Mellon grant.

I began our once-per-week meetings 2014 with a practical goal in mind: developing a competitive National Endowment for the Humanities grant proposal. Along the way, however, those meetings became spaces for discussions about broader issues in African American literary studies and pedagogy. Those conversations, and the habits they created, paved the way for where we are now.

In some ways, scholars in our field may not fully maximize their connections to one another. Many of us will devote an evening each week to a graduate seminar, yet only occasionally meet with peers. For some, conferences become the primary venue for peer interaction, even though we all know, and rarely say aloud, that conferences are not especially conducive to deep idea development. At best, they happen once a year.

I sometimes wonder: where would my thinking, and where would my projects, be if I only had space for extended idea-generation conversations once a year? What if I wasn't getting regular input from a really good problem solver like Cali? What if scholarly articles and books were my only public projects?

Those questions clarify for me that regular, collective conversation functions as essential infrastructure, shaping how ideas develop and which projects come into being.

Related:

• Developing the Black Lit Network
• Meetings and Happiness?

The year in African American poetry, 2025

February: Ariana Benson wins Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

August: Jada Renée Allen, DeeSoul Carson, Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe, and Aris Kian awarded Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

October: Cornelius Eady awarded the Wallace Stevens Award.

October: Aracelis Girmay awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

November: Patricia Smith wins National Book Award for Poetry for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.

Related: 

• Year in African American poetry entries

Remarkable Receptions Episodes (Fall 2025)

Here's a roundup of the 18 episodes of our podcast Remarkable Receptions that we released this semester.

• What Dismantling DEI means for African American Literary Studies – Howard Rambsy II

• Zora Neale Hurston’s Short Stories of Love and Betrayal – Kenton Rambsy

• The Literary Navigator Device – Howard Rambsy II

• Carolyn Denard and the Toni Morrison Society – Howard Rambsy II

• Our Most Prolific Scholarly Reader – Howard Rambsy II

• Another Social Protest Adaptation – Nicole Dixon

• Toni Morrison and Dissertations – Howard Rambsy II

• Forgotten Readers – Howard Rambsy II

• Toni Morrison and the 1970s – Elizabeth Cali

• Why Read Edward P. Jones Right Now – Kenton Rambsy

• Seeing Nigerian Writers – Howard Rambsy II

• Novelizing Black Panther – Howard Rambsy II

• Names in African American Novels – Howard Rambsy II

• Names in African American Short Stories – Kenton Rambsy

• Paul Laurence Dunbar school names – Howard Rambsy II

• Pronouncing Du Bois – Howard Rambsy II

• A Different Review Model – Howard Rambsy II

• Hearing African American literary studies – Howard Rambsy II

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

• Notes on the production of Remarkable Receptions

Hearing African American literary studies

A brief take on how African American literary knowledge has long circulated through sound as well as print, showing how Remarkable Receptions extends that oral tradition by calling listeners into an audio archive of Black literary history. 

Written by Howard Rambsy II 

Read by Kassandra Timm

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

A Different Review Model

A brief take on reimagining scholarly book reviews in African American literary studies, exploring how cluster reviews could illuminate broader developments across subfields more effectively than single-volume assessments. 

Written by Howard Rambsy II

Read by Kassandra Timm

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

Pronouncing Du Bois

A brief take on the varied pronunciations of W. E. B. Du Bois’s name, revealing how letters, scholars, and shifting preferences reflect the ongoing reception of one of Black America’s most influential intellectuals. 

Written by Howard Rambsy II

Read by Kassandra Timm

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Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions