Brian Palmer
June 2024

Brian Palmer currently lives in Virginia, where for ten years his focus — as an image maker, journalist, citizen, and descendant of enslaved people — has been illuminating what his collaborator and wife, Erin Hollaway Palmer, calls “the afterlife of Jim Crow.” Brian and Erin see this legacy of systemic racism and privilege in the continued funding of Confederate monuments and sites across the South, even as the Black Lives Matter Movement complicates and enriches the collective American narrative; and in the persistent neglect and underfunding of African American sites of memory. Since the end of 2014, Brian and Erin have been part of the volunteer effort to reclaim East End Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground in Henrico County, Virginia.

Palmer’s work — writing, photography, audio, and video — has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Smithsonian Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and on Buzzfeed, PBS, the BBC, and Reveal. Before going freelance in 2002, he served in a number of staff positions — Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report; staff writer at Fortune; and on-air correspondent at CNN. He began his career in the late 1980s as a fact-checker for the Village Voice.

With colleagues Seth Wessler and Esther Kaplan, Palmer received the Peabody Award, National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, and Online Journalism Award for “Monumental Lies,” a 2018 Reveal radio story about public funding for Confederate sites. He is a founding member of the Friends of East End Cemetery, an organization devoted to the reclamation of a historic African American burial ground under threat from multiple forces. He’s also among the founders of the Descendants Council of relatives of African Americans laid to rest in segregated burial grounds in greater Richmond and concerned citizens from the broader Black community. In 2008, he received a Ford Foundation Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom grant to complete a television-length documentary about his three trips to Iraq to document the actions of a US Marine combat unit, 1st Battalion/2d Regiment.

Palmer is a member of the board of directors of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, where he earned his MFA in 1990. He serves as SVA’s representative to Writing with Light (wwlight.org), an initiative he started with theorist Fred Ritchin in 2022 in response to the incursion of generative artificial intelligence into the realm of nonfiction or straight photography. From August 2021 to June 2023, he served as the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Palmer’s photographs are in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and private citizens, and they have been exhibited at Richmond’s 1708 Gallery, the University of Richmond Museums, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Adelphi University, Haverford College, Washington University in St. Louis and others.

Works by and about Brian Palmer

Friends of East End nonprofit organization, Richmond, VA

Historic African-American Cemeteries, an ongoing photo series on Brian Palmer’s website

American Homegoing, an ongoing photo series

2020-22: Reckoning, Resistance and Refacement in the City of Richmond, a photo series

"From the Mixed-Up Files of the Enrichmond Foundation," an investigative piece at RVA Magazine

“Covid-19 Changes Funeral Traditions,” an artcle for the Richmond Free Press

"Largest slave revolt in U.S. history lives on in reenactment," a feature video for PBS News Weekend

“Surviving the Journey,” an article about the 400th anniversary of 1619 for the Richmond Free Press

“The Costs of the Confederacy,” an article on the funding of Confederate monuments written for Smithsonian Magazine with Seth Freed Wessler

“Monumental Lies,” a Peabody Award-winning radio story about funding for Confederate memorials, available at Reveal

“For the Forgotten African-American Dead,” an opinion piece and photo essay for the New York Times

“My Inspiring Year Uncovering Forgotten African-American Graves,” an essay for Narratively

“Why Does This Old Cemetery Matter?” an article about Richmond’s East End Cemetery for Reading the Pictures

Race Trips: Confederate Lies and Apple Pie, a seven-part investigative series written for Colorline with partner Erin Holloway Palmer

Byron Smith
June 2024

Byron Smith (1960-2024) was born in Columbia, Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri – Columbia, where he pursued drawing, painting and printmaking within the Fine Arts Department. From 1992 to 1996, he co-owned Columbia’s Mythmaker Gallery. He was a longtime member of the Orr Street Artist Guild, where he occupied a studio.

As a painter, Smith worked in oil, watercolor and casein. He was best known for his landscapes of the Missouri River Valley. Smith also studied anatomical drawing and enjoyed working from the human figure when not in the landscape. Additionally, inspired by his interest in local and regional Missouri history, Smith collected works on paper and prints.

Smith’s paintings appear in multiple collections, among them the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia; The Museum of Art and Archeology at the University of Missouri; the Walters Gallery of the Boone County History & Culture Center; the Ashby-Hodge Gallery of American Art at Central Methodist University; the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia; and numerous private collections.

Work by and about Byron Smith

Byron Smith’s bio at Orr Street Studios

“Byron Smith's peace and kindness lived in his art and relationships,” a remembrance in the Columbia Missourian

“Artist Byron Smith's paintings showcased the best of Missouri,” a remembrance in the Columbia Daily Tribune

“Columbia painter Byron Smith Selected for program focused on Arrow Rock’s Black history,” a news article in the Columbia Daily Tribune

“Byron Smith: Meet the Artist and His Legacy Landscapes,” a profile of the artist in Missouri Life

Byron Smith Paints the Center for Missouri Studies, a short film released (via YouTube) by the State Historical Society of Missouri

Byron Smith: Painting Missouri, an exhibit at the Columbia Art League

"Columbia Native Byron Smith," a review of Painting Missouri in the Columbia Daily Tribune

“Heart Beat Artist of the Month: Byron Smith,” a profile of the artist in the Columbia Heart Beat

“Caretakers of Culture,” a profile of University of Missouri employees preserving and promoting Black history, featuring an overview of Byron Smith and his family’s relationship to Columbia, Missouri’s Sharp End neighborhood

Karla FC Holloway
May 2023

Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Emerita Professor of English and African American Studies and Professor of Law at Duke University. During her professional career, her classrooms and scholarship focused on literature, law, and bioethics. Since becoming emerita, Holloway has turned her full attention to writing fiction, occasional painting (anything with the color cerulean), and tweeting from @ProfHolloway.

In 2019, TriQuarterly published Holloway’s debut work of literary fiction, A Death in Harlem, set during the Harlem Renaissance. A second novel, Gone Missing in Harlem, followed in 2021 and received a Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review. Holloway is now at work on the third book in the series, A Library in Harlem, which she continued in Arrow Rock. Holloway lives and works in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and never — well, rarely — uses the telephone.

Works by Karla FC Holloway include:

• The Character of the Word (1987) 

• New Dimensions of Spirituality (1989)

• Moorings & Metaphors (1994)

• Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character (1995)

• Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial (2002)

• BookMarks: Reading in Black & White (2006)

• Private Bodies / Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics (2011)

• Legal Fictions. Constituting Law, Composing Literature (2014)

• A Death in Harlem: A Novel (2019)

• Gone Missing in Harlem: A Novel (2021)

Works by and about Karla FC Holloway

Gone Missing in Harlem, available at Bookshop.org

A Death in Harlem, available at Bookshop.org

Legal Fictions. Constituting Law, Composing Literature, available at Bookshop.org

Private Bodies / Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics, available on Amazon

BookMarks: Reading in Black & White, available on Amazon

Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial, available on Amazon

“Shield the Children,” in the New Jersey Star-Ledger

“Beloved: A Spiritual,” in Callaloo

David Todd Lawrence
May - June 2023

David Todd Lawrence is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He teaches African American literature and expressive culture, folklore studies, and cultural studies. His writing has appeared in Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Open Rivers and The New Territory. His book, When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics and Community In Pinhook, Missouri (2018, co-authored with Elaine Lawless) is an ethnographic project done in collaboration with residents of the African American town destroyed in the Mississippi River Flood of 2011. The book won the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2019.

Lawrence also co-directs the Urban Art Mapping Project, along with colleagues Heather Shirey and Paul Lorah. They started the project together in 2018. The Urban Art Mapping team created and oversees the George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art Database, a crowd-sourced, community archive of images of street art created as part of the movement for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The group was recently awarded an NEA grant to support the study of Black Lives Matter street murals created in towns and cities across the country during the summer of 2020. The team will focus on studying murals in eight cities, including Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Chicago.

Lawrence has strong roots in Missouri, where he attended high school, college, and graduate school. Both of his parents were born in the state, and his father’s family is from the historical Black hamlet of Pennytown. Located just six miles south of Marshall, Missouri (and about fifteen minutes from Arrow Rock), and founded in 1871, Pennytown was once a thriving town of Black farmers and laborers. Most of its residents left by the late 1940s, seeking better work in larger towns like Marshall and Kansas City. Only the Pennytown Freewill Baptist Church remains on the spot where Pennytown was once located. Recently, Todd has turned his thinking and writing toward the history and the present of his ancestral home of Pennytown, its decedents, and issues of land ownership and reclamation in Black life.

Work by and about David Todd Lawrence

When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics and Community in Pinhook, Missouri, available at Bookshop.org

The George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Archive, a database at Urban Art Mapping

The Covid-19 Street Art Archive, a database at Urban Art Mapping

The Drip, a literary podcast featuring academics of color discussing great books

In the Belly of the Beast, a multidisciplinary podcast about topics from cultural and literary studies to theology, social theory and politics

“The African American Folklorist of the Month: Todd Lawrence,” an interview at The African American Folklorist

“The Soul to See; The Courage to Fail: Ethnography, Relationships, and Social Change,” a colloquium talk at SoundLore

“Documenting a Global Uprising Through Protest Art in the Streets,” an article at Monument Lab

“‘The Soul to See’: Toward a Hoodoo Ethnography” an article at Open Rivers

Say Home, a musical and ethnography project with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

Taking Pinhook, a documentary at YouTube