ONLINE: Natalie Y. Moore

media release: A Room of One's Own welcomes playwright Natalie Y. Moore, author of The Billboard: A Play About Abortion, for a virtual conversation with Salamishah Tillet!

The Billboard is about a fictional Black women’s clinic in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side and its fight with a local gadfly running for City Council who puts up a provocative billboard: “Abortion is genocide. The most dangerous place for a Black child is his mother’s womb,” spurring on the clinic to fight back with their own provocative sign: “Black women take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care. #Trust Black Women.” The book also has a foreword and afterword and Q&A with a founder of reproductive justice. As a play and book, The Billboard is a cultural force that treats abortion as more than pro-life or pro-choice.

Natalie Y. Moore is an award winning Chicago-based author and journalist. Her last book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, won the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction. She is a 2021 USA Fellow. The Pulitzer Center named her a 2020 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow for international reporting.

Salamishah Tillet is a feminist activist, scholar, and writer. She is currently the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing, the founding director of the New Arts Justice Initiative housed in Express Newark, and the associate director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University–Newark. Prior, Tillet was the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor in 2010. Tillet was also an associate fellow for the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University and the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. In 2003, Salamishah and her sister Scheherazade Tillet co-founded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national non-profit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. Tillet is also a Contributing Critic-at-Large at The New York Times.