ONLINE: Jill Louise Busby

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Wesley Cummings

Jill Louise Busby

media release: An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, aka Jillisblack. Busby will appear live on Crowdcast to discuss her newest book, Unfollow Me. Join the event at: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/wbf-unfollow-me. Before the event begins, you will see a countdown and the event image.

Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in Diversity & Inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of Race, Power, and Privilege and delivered over two-hundred workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area. In 2016, fed up with what passed as progressive in the Pacific Northwest, Busby uploaded a one-minute video about race, white institutions, and faux liberalism to Instagram. The video received millions of views across social platforms. As her pithy persona Jillisblack became an "it-voice" weighing in on all things race-based, Jill began to notice parallels between her performance of "diversity" in the white corporate world and her performance of "wokeness" for her followers. Both, she realized, were scripted.

'Unfollow Me is a memoir-in-essays about these scripts; it's about tokenism, micro-fame, and inhabiting spaces-real and virtual, black and white-where complicity is the price of entry. Busby's social commentary manages to be both wryly funny and achingly open-hearted as she recounts her shape-shifting moves among the subtle hierarchies of progressive communities. Unfollow Me is a sharply personal and self-questioning critique of white fragility (and other words for racism), respectability politics (and other words for shame), and all the places where fear masquerades as progress.

Jill Louise Busby (more affectionately known as jillisblack) is a writer and filmmaker critiquing, imploding, and barrel-laughing at our personal and communal hierarchies; the myth of white fragility (and other words for racism); the endlessly-pending and highly-exclusive revolution, identity, and reaction-based illusions of societal progress; and the boundaries that all place on our lives.

Believing a shift away from anti-difference begins with an outpouring of radical, multi-generational, inclusive, and validating honesty, Jill’s work charms audiences just past their limits of comfort, inviting them to seek a new and more genuine freedom in the discomfort of truth.

The Wisconsin Book Festival is presented by Madison Public Library in partnership with Madison Public Library Foundation. For program details and the full schedule, go to wisconsinbookfestival.org.

The festival is funded with generous support from Signature Sponsor Marvin J. Levy; Presenting Sponsor Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation; Festival Patron Cheryl Rosen Weston Estate; Festival Sponsors National Endowment forthe Arts and American Girl’s Fund for Children; Contributing Sponsors The Bass Family, Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, Great Dane Pub & Brewing Co., MG&E Foundation and University Research

Park; Media Sponsors The Capital Times & Wisconsin State Journal, Isthmus, Madison365 and Wisconsin Public Radio; In-Kind Sponsors KennedyC and the Park Hotel; and Event Supporter A Room of One’s Own. Learn more about funding and support for the festival at wisconsinbookfestival.org/give.