The Writer’s Center welcomes Johnisha Matthews Levi for a reading and discussion of her new memoir, Number’s Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family. Johnisha is in conversation with DC author Bernardine (Dine) Watson.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Johnisha Matthews Levi is a nonprofit development professional and former litigation attorney. Her writing has appeared in Wildsam, thekitchn.com, Northern Virginia Magazine, and Yes! Media. She received her BA from Harvard University and her JD from New York University School of Law.
Bernardine (Dine) Watson is a non-fiction writer and poet who lives in Washington, D.C. Her memoir, Transplant, won the 2023 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize for nonfiction. Transplant also appeared on National Public Radio’s 2023 list of Books We Love. Dine was selected by Poets and Writers as one of their “5 over 50” debut authors for 2023 and was featured in the magazine’s November/December 2023 issue. Her poetry has been published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Bourgeon/Mid Atlantic Review and Gargoyle Magazine.
About the Book
A piece of paper with a previously undisclosed truth has the power to bring you to your knees.
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 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 the Black institutions and communities in Washington, DC.
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 people. Number’s Up offers a unique but quintessentially American story of survival through ingenuity as it asks: Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward?
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