Bret McCabe / Published Apr 20, 2021

Author D. Watkins explores the difference between writing about Baltimore and writing as somebody from Baltimore in the inaugural Donald Bentley Memorial Lecture for the Johns Hopkins Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts on Thursday, April 22. The virtual lecture, titled “Writing Baltimore: A Personal Journey of Lived Experience and Narrative Control,” will be livestreamed as part of the Hopkins at Home program from 4 to 5:15 p.m. and will be followed by a conversation with professor of history and English Lawrence Jackson.

Watkins’ sophisticated perspective has shaped a growing body of work that the born-and-raised Baltimore writer, University of Baltimore lecturer, Salon editor-at-large, and Johns Hopkins School of Education alum has produced since the Johns Hopkins Magazine first profiled the then emerging author in 2014. Since then, Watkins has produced three books—his most recent, We Speak for Ourselves, was named the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s 2020 One Book Baltimore and provided to all seventh and eighth graders in the city public schools—and matured into one of Salon’s sharpest observers of the increasingly complicated overlap of American politics and culture.

Watkins unsurprisingly spent much of his time during the pandemic writing, including two career firsts. He co-wrote a memoir for Baltimore-raised NBA star Carmelo Anthony, Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised, due this fall from Simon & Schuster. And he wrote a screenplay as a member of the writing team for an HBO miniseries being produced by David Simon involving a few of Simon’s The Wire creative partners, including crime novelist George Pelecanos, former Baltimore Sun journalist William Zorzi, and former Baltimore City homicide detective Ed Burns. The project is an adaptation of Sun reporter Justin Fenton’s We Own This City, about a plainclothes Baltimore Police Department violent-crime task force that robbed suspected drug dealers, sold drugs, planted evidence, and engaged in other corrupt and criminal activities.

Of course, the pandemic meant he worked on all these projects like the rest of us: from inside his home and online. “I ain’t gonna lie—I wish I could’ve gotten a chance to sit in the TV writers’ room, you know what I mean?” he says. “Zoom is cool, but you wanna sit in there and talk shit with Ed Burns.”

Regular readers of Watkins’ columns, however, know how much he enjoyed staying home, thanks to a few people who make regular appearances in his columns these days. He got married in 2019, and the couple welcomed their first child, a daughter, in January 2020. “I’m also lucky because I got to stay home,” Watkins continues. “I got to work from home and I got my daughter’s first everything, from the first time she giggled to the first time she rolled over to first steps—I got all that. And that’s been a major blessing.”

The Hub caught up with Watkins to talk about getting writing advice from Taylor Branch, learning to interview celebrities, and why he’s not cool enough to get a shoe deal.

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