Imani Perry often finds herself talking about things people get wrong about the South. For one thing, she says, there isn’t a single South, but many Souths: the upper South, the Deep South, the urban South. The South is also a lot more racially diverse than people give it credit for, and a lot less segregated, she says. It’s also not the sole source of the nation’s racism that people can make it out to be — or even might like it to be.
“If you make the South the repository for all of the nation’s sins, that bad place down there,” she said, “then you don’t have to think about what’s going on in your own community.”
Perry challenged many of the United States’ most enduring misconceptions about the region in 2022 with “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.” A combination of memoir, travelogue and deep-dive journalism, the book weaves together Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Parks, RC Cola and rhythm and blues — and leaves clear that, though she may have left Alabama for Massachusetts when she was 5, Perry very much considers the South her home.
Three years later, Perry continues to challenge perceptions and draw connections with her ninth book, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.” Published by Ecco on Jan. 28, her latest work takes a single color, blue, and examines how it has become intertwined with notions of Blackness, in ways that are well-known (such as blues music, and expressions like “feeling blue ”) or less known (including how indigo-dyed fabrics were traded for enslaved people in the 16th century).
“Imani is one of the most important writers of this period,” said Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Princeton professor who co-taught a class with Perry on the African American intellectual tradition. “In ‘Black in Blues,’ you get a sense of her capacious mind. She sees relationships that no other writer sees, and you get these extraordinary insights in this beautiful prose.”
The years since “South to America” have been thrilling for the writer. There have been career-defining accomplishments and plaudits, including a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, and the joys of watching her two sons prepare to go off to college.
The joys have been tempered by Perry’s ongoing struggles with lupus and Graves’ disease, which she also wrote about in 2023. “Sometimes my body shuts down, and I just have to let it,” she said.
And all of this has come at a time of increasing polarity in this country, a nettlesome impediment for a writer whose deepest insights often come from the most intimate of interactions with people of every stripe.
“I’m curious about people, and I tend to seek out conversation,” she said. “But there seems to be an intensity of meanness and hostility ramping up.”
She added, “I’ve become more cautious.”
In “South to America,” Perry describes having friendly conversations with a Confederate re-enactor at Harpers Ferry, and joining hands in prayer with a white Lyft driver from North Carolina whose description of heaven sounded to her curiously like a Southern plantation.
In November 2022, the book won the National Book Award for nonfiction. “Alabama now has a National Book Award,” she told the audience at the awards ceremony in New York City.
“It was overwhelmingly joyful,” she said. “My children were so happy for me. When you raise children, you’re caring for them and nurturing them. To realize that they want things for you, too, is just an unbelievable gift.”
The following year, Perry wrote the audiobook “A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain” about her experiences with lupus and Graves’ disease, which began in 1996 when she was 23. Perry was inspired to tell her story during the pandemic when she learned about people suffering from long Covid.
“I had an emotional reaction when I saw all these people experiencing what it was like to live with invisible disabilities, as I had,” she said.
She is very careful with diet and exercise now, she said, but even so, there are times when she ends up in the hospital. “As Americans, we want to think of health as a virtue, we want to think of ourselves as superhuman,” she said. “I have to reject all of that in order to accept myself, as opposed to beating myself up because my body is fragile.”
The question of how her life might have been different if she didn’t have lupus and Graves’ disease gave her pause. “Whenever I would make a new friend,” she said, “I would think, oh, I wish they knew me before I had these diseases. They would have liked me so much better. I was a lot more fun.”
For Autumn Womack, a former colleague at Princeton, the response came as a surprise. “She’s someone I think of as very fun,” she said.
In August 2023, Perry joined the faculty of Harvard University, where she holds a joint appointment in studies of women, gender and sexuality and in African and African American studies.
Two months later, Perry received a MacArthur Fellowship, often called the genius grant. “Her insightful connections between individual experiences, complex social obstacles and emergent cultural expressions,” the citation read, “infuse her scholarship with an authenticity and sense of discovery that appeals to broad audiences.”
According to Womack, the award was overdue. “When I heard she got it, I was like, doesn’t she already have one of these?”
Following critically acclaimed works about hip-hop (“Prophets of the Hood”), the “Raisin in the Sun” playwright Lorraine Hansberry (“Looking for Lorraine”) and the fin de siècle hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (“May We Forever Stand”), Perry is currently working on a middle grade book, for Norton Young Readers, about the lives of children in segregated schools.
She also hopes to put her Harvard law degree and Georgetown masters of law degree to good use on a work of fiction — her first. “I have this longstanding legal history slash jurisprudence project in my head,” she said.
Most of all, Perry wants to create something that might be of use for our current cultural moment, when many Americans are feeling isolated and cleaved from their neighbors.
“We need to be, even at the very local level, in community with each other, engaged in mutual aid and sharing,” she said. “We cannot just be concerned with our individual, private lives.”
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