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Johnisha Matthews Levi - Number's Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family - with Donna Hemans
A piece of paper with a previously undisclosed truth has the power to bring you to your knees in ways that even a person may not.
For four decades, Johnisha Matthews Levi believed a conventional story about her birth, picturing her happy parents at the hospital together. While sorting through her late mother's belongings, however, she discovered a document indicating that her father was instead serving time in the Lorton Correctional Complex. This revelation, along with rumors about an FBI investigation of her deceased parents' "private business," leads Levi to unearth the hidden history of her family. She ties this story to public policy, demonstrating how state lottery legalization and the War on Drugs disrupted Washington, DC's Black institutions and communities.
Levi's stirring memoir centers on her brilliant but troubled father, a Black World War II radioman who, facing economic barriers after his naval service, reinvents himself as a "numbers man" for an underground gambling operation. The job enables John Matthews to provide for his loved ones and to achieve a level of success far beyond his childhood dreams in the impoverished Jim Crow South. In the process, he becomes an indirect target of law enforcement.
By examining the circumstances of her father's incarceration, Levi explores how multiple generations of the Matthews family have been haunted by the specter of violence against Black Americans. Number's Up contributes to the under-explored history of how they survived through their own ingenuity as it asks: Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward.
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Johnisha (she/her) brings a critical eye to her writing based on her experiences as a development professional for social impact nonprofits, a former litigation attorney, and a culinarian. Johnisha graduated from Harvard University, New York University School of Law, and Johnson & Wales University. Her writing has appeared in Yes! Media, Wildsam, the kitchn, and Northern Virginia Magazine.
Johnisha will be in conversation with Donna Hemans. Donna Hemans is the author River Woman, Tea by the Sea and Tree of a Thousand Feet (forthcoming from Zibby Books). In 2015, she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature for the unpublished manuscript of Tea by the Sea and was named co-winner of the 2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature for River Woman.
Donna’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Slice, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, Crab Orchard Review, among others.
She was the 2007-2008 Black Mountain Institute (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) International Women’s Forum Fellow and twice served as the Lannan Visiting Creative Writer in Residence at Georgetown University. In addition, Donna has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Prince George’s County Arts Council, as well as residential fellowships from Hedgebrook, Millay Colony for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Donna received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Maryland, and is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, D.C.
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