BLACK SUMMERS: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors

This episode covers a new anthology from Wayne State University Press. Titled Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, this vibrant collection invites readers to breathe deeply and return to that "carefree" season from an urban perspective. These emerging and award-winning creators of all ages recount the struggles and triumph of staking their claim to public spaces. Ranging from poetry to essay, creative nonfiction to comics, this collection blends nostalgia with struggle and resilience. 

DESIREE COOPER

Desiree Cooper, the book’s editor, was born in Japan as a military dependent and spent her adulthood in Detroit. She now lives in coastal Virginia where she is raising her grandchildren. She is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, and among her accolades are a 2017 Midland Authors Award Winner in Adult Fiction, a 2017 Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Midwest Book Award Finalist, and inclusion in the Poets and Writers 5 Over 50.

NANDI COMER 

Our next author is Nandi Comer, an award-winning poet and essayist. She served as the 2nd Poet Laureate of the state of Michigan 2023-2025, during which time she spearheaded Michigan Words and the video series Michigan in Verse. She is the author of the chapbook American Family: A Syndrome. Her debut poetry collection, Tapping Out, won the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poets, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She currently serves as the 2025-2026 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing and co-director of Detroit Lit.

 ROCHELLE WILSON-ELLIS

Next we have, Rochelle Wilson-Ellis. She is a U.S. Navy veteran whose journey has been shaped by service, resilience, and care for others. Having served aboard the USS Ross and USS George Washington, Rochelle has carried that same spirit of dedication into every chapter of her life. A loving mother of two and a certified baker and pastry chef, she has also spent years working in healthcare. In 2021, Rochelle was trained as a citizen journalist through the Sarah E. Ray Project, helping preserve the oral histories of those who attended Detroit’s legendary Action House in the 1970s and ’80s.

 LILLIEN WALLER

Our final reader is Detroit native Lillien Waller, a poet and essayist. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and, in 2015, she received a Kresge Artist Fellowship in Poetry. In 2023, Lillien was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her essay “Listen Children, All Is Not Lost” appears in the anthology Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors.

 For more information on the book and the authors, please see the Wayne State University Press website. 

Transcript

(0:02 - 5:03)
Welcome to All Write in Sin City, a podcast about writers and writing in the Windsor-Detroit region. Your podcasters today are Sarah Jarvis, former bookseller, publishing rep, and Literary Festival chair. Kim Conklin, Windsor-based writer and filmmaker. 

And me, Irene Moore Davis, author, educator, and local historian. This episode covers a new anthology from Wayne State University Press. Titled Black Summers, Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, this vibrant collection invites readers to breathe deeply and return to that carefree season from an urban perspective. 

These emerging and award-winning creators of all ages recount the struggles and triumph of staking their claim to public spaces. Ranging from poetry to essay, creative nonfiction to comics, this collection blends nostalgia with struggle and resilience. We've invited several authors to read short selections from the book. 

We'll begin with Desiree Cooper, the project editor. Desiree Cooper spent her adulthood in Detroit and now lives in Coastal Virginia where she is raising her grandchildren. She is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and among her accolades are a 2017 Midland Authors Award winner in adult fiction, a 2017 Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Midwest Book Award finalist, and inclusion in the Poets and Writers 5 over 50. 

Now, here's Ms. Cooper to talk about the ideas behind Black Summers, Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors. Hello, my name is Desiree Cooper and I am the editor of the anthology Black Summers, Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors. This book is dedicated to the fight of little-known civil rights activist Sarah Elizabeth Wray and it's because of her that the Bablo boat, something that would be familiar to people of a certain age, that live on both sides of the river. 

Her fight against segregation on the boat really opened up an iconic experience for Detroiters and so I'm going to read you a little bit from the introduction. When I first conceived of this collection, I thought it would elicit entertaining vignettes about how Detroiters spend their time in a city where the summer sun doesn't set until a few hours before midnight. Maybe their tales would include wild animals that now roam urban neighborhoods and certainly folks would talk about the community farming movement that has been a part of the fabric of Detroit summers for decades. 

And naturally, there would be those stories about Detroit's stunning renaissance, including the nationally recognized waterfront, now cleared of toxic industry and reclaimed as a glorious public space. I thought Black Summers would be an ode to jubilance and resilience despite the legacy of racism. I had not predicted that for so many summer means childhood and so Black Summers also became a powerful, tender, and hopeful collection about personal and racial traumas of the urban outdoors. 

Many writers in these pages were moved to reconsider the struggles of their parents trying to make ends meet in an apartheid city. They tell how their parents turned to nature to heal themselves and insulate their children from life's hard edges. Writers from ages 16 to 75 encant their reverence for water, especially the Detroit River, that ancestral and spiritual divide between enslavement and freedom. 

They explore how Belle Isle, the city's magical island playground, is not only about food and family reunions but more so a cultural meeting ground for renewal, relief, and rejoicing. They would wonder what brokenness their parents hid while fishing quietly or camping in Canada. They tell how their summers were full of music lessons and festivals and concerts, listening for free from their boats in the river. 

They remember how the summers amplified their struggles with their own identities. Gay, poor, not Black enough, privileged, trans, talented. In the summers, they became a city of Ken Polk on an island, on an excursion steamer dance floor, on a waterside plaza listening to jazz.

(5:05 - 8:18)
Sarah Elizabeth Ray believed deeply that leisure, nature, and play are civil rights too, and with these stories the writers in this collection call her name, pour a verbal libration, and embrace her undying resolve that everyone deserves the freedom to have a little fun. I hope you enjoy. Our next author is Nandi Comer, an award-winning poet and essayist. 

She served as the second Poet Laureate of the State of Michigan from 2023 to 2025, during which time she spearheaded Michigan Words and the video series Michigan in Verse. She is the author of the chapbook American Family, A Syndrome. Her debut poetry collection, Tapping Out, won the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. 

Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poets, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She currently serves as the 2025-2026 J.C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing and the co-director of Detroit Lit. Hello, my name is Nandi Comer. 

I am a poet from Detroit and I am excited to share with you my poem Trump Boot that appears in the anthology Black Summers. Trump Boot, Camping in Michigan's Thumb, 2020. Root rods reach through moss and forest towards us as if to protect us from the man scratching a message in our path. 

This night we escape city light pollution for a meteor shower. We are stargazers, Ursa Major and Minor, Big and Little Dipper. We try to hold the constellations with our naked eyes, but there is a boot building a name in our path, disrupting ritual. 

We are in the thumb of it all, pork crescent, a beach, trails sprawl out. We want to get lost in the showering light, so dark. Where is my thumb? He stamped a boundary, drew a line in the sand. 

Truth is, we are amateurs. We don't know pine from cypress or juniper from human. Ahead of us, he scratches another man's name for an audience of oak and maple. 

We keep our distance, hide our faces. We dug into the mouth of the trail. It is the end of the world. 

All any of us want is to be outside, forgetting. We are in forest, unable to breathe. What is it about the end of the world that drives a boot to write out a president's name in sand? What is it about death that makes him draw a line with his foot and stand on the other side? We hear the hush of the dirt embarrassed by the route.

(8:20 - 16:33)
We walk around it, brush Trump's name out to dust. At 1 a.m., silver scythers streak dark sky. I forgive the shore. 

I forgive the waves and their crashing over sand. I forgive cliffs, the forests opening out to that shore and the many trails winding through old growth. Thank you. 

Next, we have Rochelle Wilson-Ellis. She's a U.S. Navy veteran whose journey has been shaped by service, resilience, and care for others. Having served aboard the USS Ross and USS George Washington, Rochelle has carried that same spirit of dedication into every chapter of her life. 

A loving mother of two and a certified baker and pastry chef, she has also spent years working in healthcare. In 2021, Rochelle was trained as a citizen journalist through the Sarah E. Ray Project, helping preserve the oral histories of those who attended Detroit's legendary Action House in the 1970s. Hello, my name is Rochelle Wilson-Ellis, and my entry in Black Summers is called Abosis Makes Pablo Memories. 

Growing up as a kid on the east side of Detroit, water was something that wasn't easily accessible to us, meaning we didn't have access to community centers or different avenues for us to go swimming. So, you know, if you did, you know, your parents, in my eyes as a child, your parents had to be wealthy, you know, and pay for these different memberships, whereas my parents, we weren't wealthy. My parents worked a lot, they made ends meet, but we wasn't wealthy enough where they were paying for me to have memberships to different community centers. 

So take, for example, the swimmobile. So this was this truck that was full of water, and it would come onto the neighborhood blocks, and we were able to go swimming. And so whenever it came, I felt like that was the rich man's water, because you could smell the chlorine. 

So to me, chlorine water was the rich man's water, and we're not even gonna get Boblo. It was this boat that, you know, everybody, if you were in the in crowd, you were going to Boblo. I went to Boblo every year. 

I knew that I would be, if anybody had a field trip, if it was school, if it was church, if it was my neighborhood, if it was just because that was one thing, I knew that I would be going, because that would be the time for me and my mom to be together. And on Boblo, like, you could take snacks. You could, you know, my mom would always have a cooler with juices, and she would always fry chicken. 

So, and on top of just, you know, that was time that we got to spend together. Also, you made memories. You had friends that you never see these people again, but that day that was your best friend. 

I've even experienced seeing a wedding on the Boblo boat. So as a little girl, it was, that's, I'm getting married on the Pablo boat. So when Boblo closed, that was devastating to me, because when was I going to get to spend that time with my mom? That was my biggest thing. 

How am I going to be with her? Because that was one time that I knew she would chaperone and be with me. Summing up, at 23, I ended up in the United States Navy, and so I would compare everything in there to the Boblo boat. Like, you know, I have these military personnel that is so militant, and I'm like, this is a boat. 

It floats like the Boblo boat, you know, and I would always ask them, have I ever told you about Boblo? And so that, it just all correlated together of my summers, and then I ended up being on a Navy vessel. So that is my, as a summary of my entry, I pray and hope that you all get the book, and yeah, thank you. Our final reader is Detroit native Lillian Mahler, a poet and essayist. 

Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and in 2015, she received a Kresge Artist Fellowship in Poetry. In 2023, Lillian was awarded an Arts Writer's Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her essay, Listen Children, All Is Not Lost, appears in the anthology Black Summers, Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors. 

Hi, I'm going to read an excerpt from my essay, Listen Children, All Is Not Lost. But for several summers, we did our own version of going down south and headed south to Ontario, that tip of Canada just below Detroit. My mother insisted that we should know clean air and countryside, and Ontario was close, affordable, and green. 

We arrived at the campground for the first time in late August 1970-something. My thighs had become one with the sticky vinyl backseat of my father's Plymouth Fury 3, a mossy green two-door number that I loved because the AM radio was always on, playing news reports and pop rock, and because it was his, which is to say it was him. He never spoke much during these rides, a palmol menthol dangling from his lower lip burned down to the filter, like Andy Capp in the funny papers. 

My mother, too, was mostly quiet, except to comment about how beautiful the scenery was, or to wonder whether she had forgotten something. When the radio played the latest hit, as if on cue, we'd all spontaneously erupt into song. Bad, bad, Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town. 

And my mother asked my brother, sisters, and me, when did it become okay for you to curse? We looked at each other like, those are the words, and kept singing only lower. Mitchell's Bay on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair is a little more than an hour's drive from where we lived on the east side of Detroit, but it was another world, so much so that the ride felt as if hours had passed, or maybe that's just the way a six-year-old's mind works. I could just make out the tops of trees and telephone poles as we whizzed by, except for when my sister Terry perched me on her lap.

(16:35 - 17:37)
Finally, we drove through a stand of trees, out of which had been carved a handful of slightly drab cream-colored prefab cottages arranged in a circle. In the center stood a stone well where we would get all of our drinking water. Our cabin, we would discover, was outfitted inside with wall-to-wall pine paneling and the occasional spider. 

It also had a wooden screen door, which we slammed every time we came and left, as if we were at home. Thanks for joining us. Look for more episodes of All Right in Sin City wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit our website at allrightinsincity.com. For information and announcements of new episodes, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform, or follow us on social media.