The HillTalks

The HillTalks (2022-Present) is a weekly news roundup podcast by The Hilltop, the nation’s oldest Black collegiate newspaper. We take stories from the paper and talk about them with the reporters who wrote them. I wrote, produced, edited, and hosted the show’s second season.

Here are a few of my favorite episodes.

A Howard University student was killed after being struck by a car driven by a Howard faculty member. At the time of the episode's release, The Hilltop published a few articles about the incident, but I wanted to spend some time on the show getting to know the student, Mohamed Samura, and ask questions that came about since he passed. I spoke to Samura's classmates and took listeners to a vigil in his honor. The episode became the most downloaded episode in the show's history.

For the last segment of this episode, we take the listener to the scene of a demolished student-run garden, and I talk to the garden’s president.

I had a lot of fun making his episode. We discussed a range of topics, the first being Howard dining workers alleging a toxic work environment. Employees formed a picket line outside of a campus building, and the episode includes a soundbite from their demonstration.

Black History Moment: How the Black National Anthem Came to Be (2024) is a short radio spot on a moment in Black history. This was a school assignment, and I chose to tell the story of how the Black National Anthem came to be.

The week this episode came out, HU Students for Justice in Palestine wrote a letter to The Hilltop. I interviewed the member of the organization that wrote it, and we discussed their qualms with the university.

For a special episode of the podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stacey Abrams. We had a robust discussion about voter suppression, democracy, the political influence of HBCUs, and what’s at stake in this year’s election.

This is the trailer I made for my premiere season as host of, “The HillTalks.”

Conjuring Connection (2022) is an 18-minute audio story I made during my junior year of college. A professor asked the students in my Multimedia Storytelling class to tell a story over Thanksgiving break. I was spending it alone and away from family for the first time and chose to document what that was like for me and five other people who were also away from family during the holiday.