Author Ladee Hubbard on love, family and resilience

Ladee Hubbard's brand-new collection of short stories, The Last Suspicious Holdout, takes place in an unnamed southern majority-Black suburb in the nineties and early 2000s.

It's designed like a kind of diary for the community, with interconnecting events, people and places.

As the years tick by, the adults fight for justice and financial security while grieving lost loved ones; the children grow up and become aware of the struggles they will inherit.

Ladee Hubbard spoke with NPR's Juana Summers. Below are highlights from their conversation.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

On what inspired Hubbard to write the book

Originally, this collection was going to be about the 20 years prior to Obama's election. And it's somewhat self-referential in that I was talking about myself and my generation, the generation of Black people that grew up in what was sometimes called "the post-civil rights era." So we were coming to maturity during