Claiming a Black-Biracial Identity Through Memory, Memoir, and Connections with Shannon Luders-Manuel

This episode features our conversation with Shannon Luders-Manuel, which was live-streamed on September 7, 2025. We welcomed Shannon back to the virtual platform to talk about her debut memoir, The One Who Loves You. 

Shannon Luders-Manuel is the author of the memoir, The One Who Loves You: A Memoir of Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World, published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press which was released in February of 2025. Shannon holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written extensively about race, with bylines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. In 2015, she wrote the viral For Harriet essay “What it Means to be Mixed Race During the Fight for Black Lives.” Luders-Manuel presented her master’s thesis at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference in Chicago in 2012 and was a featured writer at the 2014 Mixed Remixed Festival in Los Angeles. She performs sensitivity reads for major publishers, providing feedback on Black and mixed-race characters and issues.

To learn more about Shannon, please visit shannonludersmanuel.com. 

Purchase your copy of The One Who Loves You today via Black Writers Read's Bookshop link.

Check out the first time Shannon was on the virtual platform: Season One Episode Seven

Find Shannon on Instagram: @shannon_luders_manuel

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