Author and Book Feature-LeRhonda S Manigault-Bryan

Meet author LeRhonda S Manigault-Bryant!

LeRhonda S Manigault-Bryant is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College who completed her undergrad studies at Duke University. She earned her Masters of Divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University, while also getting a PhD in religion from Emory’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. As a filmmaker (founder of ConjureGirlBlue Productions) and musician, she spends her days spreading her own religious teachings with a focus on ethnography.

Talking to the Dead is an ethnography book written by LeRhonda S Manigault-Bryant. It captures the customs and heritage of the Gullah women, and how they communicate with their ancestors through varieties of methods. Prayer, dreams, visions, storytelling, and different crafts are all viable connections to the spirits. In doing this, these women are able to obtain guidance and tips on how to live out their own faith and treat their living loved ones. This long time practice is able to revive and strengthen the spirituality of Gullah and Geechee society. It is able to integrate Christianity and older folk traditions into one cohesive spiritual language.

LeRhonda S Manigault-Bryant shares the ways in which long standing traditions are not only kept as an homage to ancestors before, but how they can still stand to broaden one’s spirituality today. With guidance, acceptance, and keeping faith alive, we are able to channel our inner divinity and learn to treat the ones around with respect and admiration just as we treat the passed.

This book is a beautiful ethnography novel designed to teach, but also to inspire. Check out Talking to the Dead at Binya now.

(Author’s note: “Ethnography” means the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures. We had to look that one up!)