By Sonya Lea

I met Irvin Weathersby Jr. on the day before the United States national elections last fall. We were on opposite ends of the country, talking about his book, In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art & Public Space (Penguin Random House, 2025). The book is a work of nonfiction, a close examination of the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces, monuments, and markers of history. It confronts and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma. Beautiful in its language and masterful in scope, Weathersby asks questions about “the truths we are taught because we can’t look away.” He wonders if we “really do need to see death.” Scenes from the author’s life make this book read like a memoir, and Weathersby’s wise voice, as an art and cultural critic, interrogates works and histories that contain racial violence and oppression.

A spirited and often poetic treatment of an important and timely topic.

On a sweltering  July day, in the Carriage House on the St. Joseph’s campus in Clinton Hill, Irvin sat down for a conversation with Tim Coover, a Foundry Fellow, Writer’s Foundry Review editor, and a former student. Over coffee and chocolate croissants, they discussed many topics related to Irvin’s forthcoming memoir: art, politics, the value and the danger of museums, and how to be a citizen of this contradictory country.

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowships

Irvin Weathersby Jr. lectures in the English Department at Queensborough Community College, teaching composition and creative writing. A 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Mr. Weathersby often writes about race and the Black experience. A former high school teacher and re-entry educator in Baltimore, the South Bronx and Harlem, his writing centers on marginalized communities. Irivin’s essays have appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic, The Root, EBONY, and elsewhere talks about his upcoming book, In Open Contempt (Viking/Penguin), a memoir-in-essays focused on expressions of white supremacy in art found in New Orleans, his hometown, and around the world.