Guest post written by The Seven Daughters of Dupree author Nikesha Elise Williams
Nikesha Elise Williams is a two-time Emmy award winning producer, an award-winning author, and producer and host of the Black and Published podcast. A narrative strategist by day and journalist always, her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Bitter Southerner, Essence, and Vox. Nikesha’s work has been supported by the Kimbilio Fiction Fellowship, the DeGroot Foundation, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. A Chicago native, she lives in Florida with her family.
About The Seven Daughters of Dupree: From the two-time Emmy Award–winning producer and host of the Black and Published podcast comes a sweeping multi-generational epic following seven generations of Dupree women as they navigate love, loss, and the unyielding ties of family in the tradition of Homegoing and The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois. Out January 27th 2026.
“Are you pregnant,” the judge asked.
“No,” I answered.
We were three-fourths of the way through my final divorce hearing. My attorney told me the procedure would take five minutes. At 10:50 a.m. I logged in to the meeting from my badly lit, sound-proof, foam padded home studio where I conducted interviews for my podcast. At 10:55 the judge entered the meeting.
When I dared glance at myself onscreen the woman who stared back was not okay. Hair piled high in a curly puff after a week of wearing a twist out showed off the clear skin of a grief-stricken face; eyes dull but determined.
After a question about residency the judge pronounced me “single and unmarried.” I mumbled a quick, “Thanks,” before I traded the virtual courtroom for my interview set.
Five and-a-half hours later a literary agent called and offered me representation for a book I initially began for a contest.
You have to understand, I’ve been trying to “get on” as a writer since I finished my undergrad thesis in 2008. I tried the traditional author math of MFA + Agent + Book Deal = Literary Success. I stalled out at the MFA when I couldn’t afford to apply to more than three programs, was rejected from one and waitlisted for the others.
I centered the mass comm side of my degree and became a working journalist, a television news producer, who wrote on the side. I put together a poetry collection, then an essay collection, and emailed an old college professor for advice.
Tell me, how do I get on?
He told me to buy a Writer’s Market. I thumbed through the thick book twice and started a blog until life inspired art and I found myself between news jobs staring at an online contest. The now defunct Critique My Novel.
The gist: Send us your first 10,000 words and we’ll give you professional feedback.
I did.
They did.
I kept going until two years and a baby later I had a first draft. In March of 2015 I made a celebratory Facebook post and tagged friends about accomplishing my first goal for the New Year with two more to go. Those other goals ran the revised equation: Agent + Book Deal = Literary Success.
I got agents.
We went on submission.
No deal.
I pivoted to self-publishing and internalized all the stigma that being indie was less than, and that I was not good enough (a line of thinking that began with the MFA) because I wasn’t able to secure a traditional deal.
From 2017 to 2020 I self-published five novels and one poetry collection. I hired editors and graphic designers but handled the marketing and publicity myself. I wrote press releases for every new release, emailed news friends in different markets about appearing on their morning shows, pestered print reporters for reviews and interviews, badgered librarians about leading workshops, and submitted myself for book festivals I could drive to, or in the event I had to fly, made sure I was in a city with a friend or family member who would allow me to crash on their couch.
Outwardly I projected confident professional author while inside I debased my lack of mainstream success. My refusal to be a failure, to settle for mole hills instead of mountains, fueled my drive. I hit the highway traveling four to eight hours round trip for a five-minute interview in Savannah, Orlando, or Tampa in the name of “getting on.”
My quest took me through the DMs of show runners, book influencers, established authors, and the occasional celebrity. My messages were bumbling and confused. The request of someone who wanted help and needed direction but was too proud to ask and too ashamed for not being good enough in the first place. No one responded to my embarrassingly earnest entreaties, Tell me how to get on, or better yet, Please, put me on.
I now know there is no one path or right path to publishing. The work of writing and the business of publishing are separate roads that sometimes intersect. For me, the on ramp emerged like a mirage in the desert in 2020; six months after I traded television for full-time freelancing. An essay I’d written caught the eye of the acquisitions editor at LSU Press and led to my seventh book, my first nonfiction, Mardi Gras Indians. But novels are my heart and I just knew eight years after Critique My Novel a contest was my ticket all the way on.
At 39 weeks pregnant, I started a draft for what is now my Big Publishing debut, The Seven Daughters of Dupree. I wrote twenty-five pages in seven days. I went to the hospital June 10, 2021 and gave birth to my daughter at 2:12 the next morning. When I returned home, newborn in tow, and my son eagerly awaiting our arrival, I put the baby in the Pack-n-Play stationed in our living room so I could read over my contest submission and send it in time for the deadline.
Only then did I realize, If you’re a finalist for this contest, they’re going to want to see a whole manuscript.
I cursed my desperation and wrote a bloated first draft while breastfeeding from chafed nipples; writing freelance pieces at three in the morning; while completing edits for Mardi Gras Indians while my son kicked and yelled “Kia” at karate practice; while producing Black & Published podcast, and while my marriage crumbled in the bitter acid I swallowed every time I watched the back of my now ex-husband’s bald head walk out of the front door. I was post-partum and depressed, my edges shedding from the root, as I held on to the vain hope I’d win the contest grand prize of a $50,000 publishing contract. I believed the external validation would be enough to mollify the multiple magazine rounds shot through my marriage over ten-and-a-half years.
It wasn’t.
I was not a finalist.
Instead, I retained an attorney and set my life ablaze. Over the next eighteen months I wrote and parented my two children, wrote and got a nine-to-five job, wrote and sent in my divorce discovery the same week a friend got married; slowly accepting that I was choosing to become a Black single mother—another stigma whose shame I’m trying not to internalize—hellbent on making a career as a creative.
In March of 2023, two weeks after my divorce, I signed with the agent who called me the same day of the final hearing. We went on submission in May. One editor I spoke with mentioned she was among the team who ran the contest I submitted to, two years prior. When I decided, she was my editor, she told me, “Nikesha, I checked the archives of the contest. I said “Yes,” to you two years ago.”
My path to publishing at this level is littered with kismetic happenstance from the contest, to my agent making an offer the same day of my divorce, to the fact that my daughter share’s a birthday with my editor’s daughter. The amount of overlap between my life and my art is proof of what the author Dantiel W. Moniz told me during a podcast interview, “Publishing is a combination of luck, timing, and opportunity.” With this trifecta in place ,I am slowly untangling my tortured thinking and muzzling my inner critic. It is a relentless exercise in forgiveness and affirmation after years of taking every professional rejection as a personal one.
If we’re still running the author math I have acquired two of the operations.
Agent + Book Deal.
Is Literary success next? To Be Determined.
What I do know is that after 17 years of writing and trying and trying and writing some more, I think I’m on.
