Study Hall Subscriber Book Club: Neesha Powell-Ingabire’s Memoir “Come By Here”

In the spring of 2020, footage of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old Black man, went viral. Earlier that year, Arbery was jogging through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia when three white men chased and killed him. Neesha Powell-Ingabire grew up in Brunswick. She attended a high school class with one of the Arbery’s killers. As a movement journalist and organizer, the horrifying national story felt distinctly personal. Irked by the mainstream media’s flat, grim portrayal of her hometown, Powell-Ingabire began writing Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast as her thesis at Georgia College & State University’s MFA program. 

The cross-genre memoir weaves together Powell-Ingabire’s reflections on her family’s history, reporting on the Gullah Geechee (a coastal Southern Black community which practices indigenous Western and Central African traditions) as well as Black farmers, and the region’s legacy of Black resistance. Although it’s a deeply personal read, throughout the memoir, Powell-Ingabire shares apprehension with being a voice of authority and emphasizes the need to center her sources.

“I identify as both an organizer and a journalist, and I don’t see a contradiction in that even though in traditional journalism, you learn that you have to be objective at all times, you have to be neutral,” she tells Study Hall. 

Powell-Ingabire has written for outlets like Autostraddle, VICE, and Prism and works as the Director of Popular Education at Press On, a Southern Media Collective.

Study Hall spoke to Powell-Ingabire about her writing process, the value of oral history, and highlights from her reporting on Georgian coastal communities. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.