Professor McFadden,
I came to your work the way some people stumble into sacred places, unaware that they’re standing on holy ground. Sugar was my entry point. I didn’t know then that it was your first novel. I simply knew that I was holding something potent. What followed was a journey through your canon, one book at a time, in the order you offered them to the world. With each page, I found myself undone, reassembled, and left holding pieces of myself I didn’t even know were scattered.
I laughed out loud in empty rooms. I wept without shame. I closed your books mid-chapter just to breathe. I caught myself talking to your characters as if they were kin. I imagined conversations over coffee with Harlan, Donovan, and Malcolm, hoping my questions wouldn’t cause them to retreat. It wasn’t until I made my way to First Born Girls that I realized how deeply personal The Warmest December and so many of the stories within your novels truly were. You had given us not just fiction. You had given us fragments of your own becoming (your ache, your epiphanies, your thresholds of healing and harm).
And now, returning to your earlier work with new eyes, I see it with even greater clarity. The way you’ve written the textures of your life into these stories (your longings, your laughter, your lacerations) is nothing short of astonishing. There is an old gospel song by CeCe Winans that says, “You don’t know the cost of the oil in my alabaster box,” and I think of that every time I close one of your books. There is a price to telling truth that nakedly, that exquisitely. You have paid it. You continue to pay it.
I deeply wish I could be a student of yours at Tulane University. I believe, without hesitation or doubt, that being guided by you would deepen the effectiveness of my writing as a scholar practitioner. If you and Tulane ever found a way to include those of us who do not reside locally in your courses, please know I am there. Without question, without delay.
As I sit with your stories, I am reckoning with my own. I think about the quiet beauty of my mother’s presence, the strength and steadiness of my father’s guidance, and the layered history that lives in the voices of my siblings and elders. I carry within me a deeply nuanced and complex existence—one that has, at times, disrupted and healed the very soil from which I come. The intersections of my family’s love and loss, our pain and our praise, our defeats and our resurrections, have shaped the parts of me that are now blessings to others. I wonder how to carry the laughter, the longing, and the lessons of my people into my work without diluting them for comfort or performance. Your books do not flinch. They do not apologize. They remind me that I, too, can tell the truth with beauty and without betrayal.
Thank you for your courage. Thank you for writing stories that recognize us. Thank you for showing that survival can be stitched into fiction and still come out whole.
With all my radical love and deep reverence,
Dr. Rob J. Thrash IV