Philadelphia native Bernardine “Dine” Watson — one of the featured authors at the upcoming Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections conference at Temple University — joins us in conversation with Mt. Airy resident Fasaha Traylor, co-author of They Carried Us: The Story of Philadelphia's Black Woman Leaders. To reserve your copy of the book, please use the “Add to Cart” button on this page.
Bernardine (Dine) Watson is a writer, poet, and self-proclaimed “South Philly girl.” She is the author of Transplant: A Memoir, an award-winning memoir about her journey with kidney disease published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. In 2023, she was honored by Poets & Writers magazine as one of their ‘5 over 50’ debut writers, and Transplant: A Memoir was included in National Public Radio’s end-of-year “Books We Love’ list.
As noted by the author Marita Golden, “Bernardine Watson has written a beautiful memoir about the struggle to maintain health while living with a potentially lethal disease. But Transplant: A Memoir is mostly a book about becoming: a woman, a mother, a member of a family she learns to love better, and a loved and treasured soul mate. Through her struggle, she becomes much more than her disease and bigger and braver than she could have imagined.”
Bernardine Watson has written on social policy issues for numerous major foundations, nonprofit organizations, and the Washington Post’s Health and Science section and She the People blog. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Rising Voices, Sanctuary, and The Great World of Days. A member of the 2015 class of the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities Poet in Progress Program, she was also selected to participate in the 2017 and 2018 classes of the Hurston Wright Foundation’s Summer Writers’ Workshop for Poetry. Bernardine ‘Dine’ Watson lives in Washington DC.
Fasaha M. Traylor founded and directed an independent school, administered a program to link resources of a local university with community needs, served on the board of a national human rights group, and chaired the boards of a child advocacy and a grant makers organization. She is a 22-year veteran of philanthropy and now a principal of Lift Every Voice, LLC. She was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship, the Art Peters Memorial Fellowship (journalism) and the Temple University Urban Fellowship.