Get an agent & reach More Readers with fredara hadley
Fredara is an ethnomusicologist at Julliard where she specializes in African American music. Here she talks about how just one of her many public-facing projects led to a agented book.
Fredar Hadley
Musicologist, Music History Department, The Juilliard School
Curator of the Black History Month concert Claiming Your Space: A Celebration of Black of Music at Juilliard
Contributor to the Emmy Award–winning docuseries The 1619 Project
Author of the forthcoming book, I’ll Make Me a World
S&W services used: Book Development and Book Proposal with Daniela
Q&A
A few years ago you wrote Beyonce’s Coachella Set Was A Landmark Celebration of HBCUs & Southern Black Culture for Billboard, which made a literary agent reach out to you. What happened next?
After I connected with my agent, Mariah, I panicked. It made the book feel more “real.” And when I signed with her agency, I was still really early in the research process. I was sure of the subject, music, and HBCUs, but I didn’t have a clue about how to write this book. But in hindsight, signing with an agent has helped me not to quit.
Once you decided to write a book for a broader audience, what kinds of challenges and/or opportunities came up?
The challenge was checking my academic ego that said, “I wasn’t writing a real book” because it was going to be for a general audience. The opportunity was that all kinds of audiences invited me to talk about my research: law firms, podcasts, universities, museums, and churches. And that’s been great.
You give a lot of talks about your research. How does that help you as a writer?
Having to give regular talks on the music of HBCUs has been helpful because even when I couldn’t work on drafting chapters of the book, I still had to write the talks I would give. And I rarely repeated talks, so I was constantly exploring different angles of the topic. Plus, whenever I gave a talk, there was a Q&A, and questions sharpened my thinking and opened up new avenues of exploration. All of those exchanges added depth to my writing. I even got an academic article published based on a talk I gave!
Lastly, now that I am drafting chapters again, it’s been helpful to return to those talks where I said something really clearly that I can expound upon in the book.
Bonus: What do you wish we had asked you? Or what advice do you want to give to other writers like you?
My advice would be to let your creative voice sing in your scholarly writing. Whatever those elements pull you into prose or makes the writing enjoyable for you, there’s a place for that in scholarly writing. Personally, I think a lot about rhythm, breathability, and how prose shows up on the page. I think as much about what I want the reader to feel as they read my work as I do what I want them to learn.
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