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Dr. Ashanté M. Reese

@dramreese

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Professor | Anthropologist | Food Scholar
Author: GATHER (@w.w.norton 2026) and BLACK FOOD GEOGRAPHIES (@uncpress 2019)

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Thirsty Thursdays kicks off this week on 10/29, 3pm Eastern! I am excited for Teona Williams and Danielle Purifoy to talk with Dr. Ashantè Reese in celebration of her latest book, Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness. Grounded in foodways, memory, and everyday survival strategies, Dr. Reese will explore gathering as a core methodology for documenting Black life, followed by an open discussion with attendees. All Thirsty Thursday salons are virtual and open to the public. Register with the QR code or at the link in my comment.

Dr. Ashanté M. Reese is a writer, anthropologist, and associate professor of African and African Diaspora at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research and writing trace threads between Black geographies, food justice, and care to tell deeper stories about how history, place, and taste converge to create freedom and survival. In her work, she considers the agency and assets of Black communities to directly challenge one-dimensional models that frame Blackness as inherently lacking. She looks for what is present as well as what is absent and takes seriously the idea that Black folks can teach us a lot about power and inequity but also collectivity and care. Whether she is writing about structural violence or how people gather around a meal, she is keenly interested in what connects us, what divides us, and how people craft lives amid so much uncertainty.

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Join the Social Justice Initiative on Friday, October 23 in welcoming Jafari Allen (Columbia), Charlene Carruthers (UC Riverside), Roderick Ferguson (Yale), Jaden Janak (St. Olaf College), Barbara Ransby (UIC), Ashanté Reese (UT Austin), and Ula Taylor (Berkeley) for an urgent discussion and strategy session on the attacks on Black and Africana Studies.

Register today at go.uic.edu/SJIxASA-2026

📅 Friday, October 23, 2026
⏰ 10:30 AM - 1:00 PM
📍UIC Student Center East | Tower Room 301 | 750 S. Halsted St.
✨ A light lunch will be served

This session is part of the Social Justice Institute held in conjunction with the American Studies Association Conference, and stems from a national forum organized by Jafari Allen in the spring in response to the wave of cuts targeting Black studies.

Both ASA conference-goers and the general public are welcome. Following the panel, there will be breakout sessions and a light lunch will be provided.

We hope to see you there! Green and dark green textured background with text advertising Black Studies Under Fire

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This week 😎

She wanted to do the fire this time 🥹

#PinkCake 🥹

My @vans shirt sparked this showing of their garden
#marigold #cempasuchil #diademuertos💀 #díadelosmuertos #cowpea

He gave me these I promise!
#cowpea #purplehullpeas

🏆 @comadre_panaderia

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I'm so excited to announce this upcoming community event and author talk centered around the most recent release by @dramreese titled Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness.

This an open community event. We will be having local foods and market pop up with community partners, land stewards, some creative activities, open mic, leading into a conversation led by the amazingly beautiful spirit and land steward extraordinaire @christina.sows.and.grows

Of course, the crew, my fellow hostesses with the mostesses will be out there, @liberationislit and @voyagefarms as well slanging dranks and books!

Rsvp using the GATHER link in bio or by followingthe link mentioned in the flyer!

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September wrap up! Despite going back to work this month, I still managed to finish 8 books and I enjoyed them all!
📚 swipe for reviews!

At least my audiobook game came back with my commute! 🎧

Lots of 5-star reads this month! 🌟

It was refreshing to not read any 500+ page books this month

📖😤
“Bad Words” by @rioghnachrobinson I got an ALC of this on @libro.fm and I absolutely loved this book!! A TRUE enemies-to-lovers contemporary romance, but also a lit fic novel that explores the literary/publishing world, social media, family expectations, metal health, and cancel culture. The writing is absolutely stunning, told in dual POV between a fledgling author and a literary critic, each writer’s unique voice comes through the page beautifully. I will say, I would have rather read this than listened to it, because there are email/social media exchanges throughout the novel, but even with the awkwardness of listening to that it was still 5 stars from me. I will, however be picking up a physical copy now that it’s out!

❄️🌌🎁
I re-read “A Court of Frost and Starlight” by @sarahjmaas for @afterglow_books ACoTaR prep book club! A cozy holiday novella in between the dramatic high-tension books in this series. Was definitely hunting for clues in this one, I feel like it reveals a lot more than we think it does.

🎹🐤💗
“Love Felt Like This” by @julieoliviaauthor How Julie Olivia makes me continue to fall for single dad MMCs should be studied. A warm fuzzy story that somehow manages to be both a rockstar romance and a small town romance. Duel POV, fake dating trope, the FMC is a Jim-Henson-coded puppeteer, and they’re working together to save a beloved children’s show.

🦋✊🏽
For my personal quest to read classics written by women, “In the Time of the Butterflies” by @writerjalvarez historical fiction based on the true story of a group of sisters involved in rebellion against the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez’s storytelling is masterful. WeChat characters own unique voice and perspective shines through the prose and makes this novel so human and incidentally absolutely heartbreaking.

🥼💕🧪
I re-read “The Love Hypothesis” by @alihazelwood

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For the month of October, Rooted Reads will read “Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness by Dr. Ashanté M. Reese. About six months ago, I reached out to my favorite food scholar, Dr. Jessica Walker, asking about my project Leave It On the Altar: Death, Food, Memory, and Rituals. I was interested in this intimate relationship between food and death, specifically, how and where Black Death food rituals are being preserved and practiced today. Dr. Jessica Walker immediately pointed me in the direction of Dr. Reese’s book, and so I ran to my local bookstore and ordered a copy in the hopes of finding some answers. In the first few pages, I knew I had been directed to the right place. Dr. Reese stated, “Nourishment is bigger than what we eat, and it starts before we ever offer or consume food…that if we truly care about nourishing physical bodies, we first have to commit to nourishing whole people. That starts with values like building community across differences, equitably sharing resources, building trust such that you believe others enter spaces with good intentions, and prioritizing caring for others over competition. These and similar values show up in gatherings I focus on in this book: in garden spaces, at repasts and reunions, and within mutual aid efforts.” It is through this broadening of the word “nourishment” and emphasis on the “whole” and “collective” that I knew I needed to add this selection to the book club reading list.
My great-cousin used to say, “Black folx have experienced everything under the sun” – and I add that we have always found ways to hold ourselves and others together to provide the care we need to survive everything that has come our way. This selection shows us a history and possibility of what freedoms we can create together when care, connection, and service are practiced.
October’s meetup will be the Author Book Talk and Signing event at Call & Response, 1390 E. Hyde Park BLVD. Please RSVP and purchase tickets ($5 per person) by using the link in bio or directly at the Call & Response website. Looking forward to seeing everyone on the 22nd of this month.

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Friday mood: mentally on the bus, browsing books.✨️

Find us tomorrow, October 3, at PROOF: A Midwest Lit Fest, 10–4.
Indiana Humanities | 1500 N. Delaware St.

#BlackWorldschoolers🌍 #Midwest #indiebookstore

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@callandresponsechi is a Black woman owned bookstore on the Southside of Chicago. They are a fierce advocate for underrepresented authors and work tirelessly to be the kind of business that centers community in everything they do. With regular author events, community events, and a warm and inviting in-shop atmosphere, they are a bookstore I could not recommend more highly. Currently, they have copies of all three Left Unread books in stock, which you can pick up in-store or order online! And when they are out of stock, you can still order through their bookshop storefront, which is linked on their website. Go grab some books and sign up for an upcoming event! #leftunread #bindery #indiebookstores #callandresponse #leftunreadbooks

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Book recommendation! I was lucky to get a copy of this book from @w.w.norton in the mail this week and I feasted on it, reading it in one sitting this afternoon. I will now be seeking out all of Ashante Reese’s books. My goodness, the way she weaves her own narrative seamlessly through a tightly conceived text that also includes interviews and historical context. It’s magic. She’s already upturned the syllabus I was designing as I’ve decided at the last minute to work in this book filled with hope and blueprints for a brighter future. #bookreview #foodhistory #foodjustice

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I’ve been on the move this month so September has been packed with audiobooks. ☺️

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DAY THREE AT NYBALF 2026

Big day today.

We begin online at 11 AM with A Gate Between Two Worlds: re/membering queer Afrikan technologies of resistance, presented by HoodSchool NYC. The workshop moves through archival material, political and theoretical inquiry, critical fabulation and creative practice to ask what queer African histories have been suppressed, and what they might still teach us about liberation, identity and Pan-African solidarity.

At 11:30 AM, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Uju Anya, George Ekwensi and Kurt Thometz lead The Market and Popular Literature, returning to Onitsha Market Literature and the larger question of who literature is made for, what ordinary readers want from books, and what publishing can learn from forms that flourished outside metropolitan approval.

At 1 PM, Ozoz Sokoh and Ashanté M. Reese gather us around food, memory and the table in Come Chop. And yes, there will be actual food in the house.

At 2:30 PM, Conceição Evaristo, João Melo and Dr. Calila das Mercês bring together major voices in Black writing in Portuguese for a bilingual conversation on language, memory, colonial inheritance and literary imagination.

At 4 PM, editor and critic Lovia Gyarkye joins Arie and Chuko Esiri to discuss Clarissa, their contemporary Lagos reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and what happens when literature moves into cinema, another city, another history and another visual language.

And from 5–7 PM, nearby at Fumo Caffe e Vino, Claridad Wellness hosts The Shadow Work Social, a community gathering built around journaling, storytelling, memory and intentional conversation. A chance to move from reading stories into thinking about the stories we carry ourselves.

At 6 PM, we close the formal NYBALF 2026 programme with a true giant of literature, Conceição Evaristo: A Literary Life, a conversation on memory, ancestry, Black women’s lives, escrevivência and a body of work that has transformed contemporary Brazilian literature.

Walk-ins are welcome. Seats are unreserved and first-come, first-seated, subject to capacity.

Sunday, September 20
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue, New York

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TOMORROW AT NYBALF 2026

Join us at @harlemstage tomorrow's NYBALF 2026 events as we move through food, popular literature, Black writing in Portuguese, cinema, and a closing keynote with Conceição Evaristo.

11:30 AM · The Market and Popular Literature
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Kurt Thometz and Uju Anya on Onitsha Market Literature, readership, popular writing and who literature is made for.

1:00 PM · Come Chop
Ozoz Sokoh and Ashanté Reese on food, memory, geography, nourishment and the art of gathering.

2:30 PM · Black Writing in Portuguese
Conceição Evaristo, João Melo and Dr. Calila das Mercês in a bilingual conversation on language, memory, Black literary traditions and the Portuguese-speaking world.

4:00 PM · Literature into Cinema
Arie and Chuko Esiri join Lovia Gyarkye to discuss adapting Mrs Dalloway into contemporary Lagos through Clarissa.

6:00 PM · A Literary Life: Conceição Evaristo
We close the festival with a keynote conversation on memory, ancestry, women’s lives, community and escrevivência.

The festival marketplace and bookstore open from 10 AM.

Walk-ins are welcome. Seats are unreserved and first-come, first-seated, subject to capacity.

Sunday, September 20
Harlem Stage, The Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue

Come spend the final day with us.

#NYBALF2026 #TheVillageintheBook #HarlemStage

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