Speaking on (Ethical?) Blood Sucking
Featured Guests: Annaya Baynes and Kenna McCafferty
Bring out the garlic, crosses, and wooden stakes. This episode is all about vampires, and we get into it with Girls Write Now fellows Annaya Baynes and Kenna McCafferty. They discuss the history of vampires in Western media, the ethics of living under capitalism, and the way Black women often have the weight of the world placed on their shoulders. In this season two finale episode, you’ll get to hear all about Annaya’s work-in-progress Innocent Blood.
Music by mentee alum Jaya Rao-Herel
Annaya Baynes
Kenna McCafferty
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Annaya Baynes
Annaya Baynes (she/they) is excited to join the Girls Write Now team as a Fellow after being a mentee. They recently graduated from Spelman College with a Bachelor of Arts in English and French. As an undergraduate, she worked on Spelman's social justice podcast, The Blue Record, and the reproductive justice-oriented podcast Black Feminist Rants. Annaya has interned at various publishing houses, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and The Feminist Press. They have a deep love for literature and film. In her free time, she enjoys baking.
Kenna McCafferty
Kenna McCafferty's writing journey began at home. With her mom as her elementary school librarian, she was quickly introduced to the world of reading and writing. Spending her early childhood in Vienna, Austria, she learned to use writing as a powerful tool of exchange and self discovery. She has since earned a BA in Modern Political Messaging, a major of her own design, from Emerson College. During her time at Emerson she worked with youth development organizations like YouthxLead Sharon and 826 Boston to empower students to find their creative voice. In PR, she worked with mission-driven organizations to communicate around events, initiatives and institutional messaging with a concentration in non-profits, and universities. Her journalistic work has appeared in places like office magazine, PAPER magazine, Alternative Press, The Creative Independent, Dazed, LUNA Collective and more. She has interviewed everyone from Arlo Parks to Coco & Clair Clair, with a special knack for catching on to emerging artists before they make it big. A voracious listener, she continues to conduct interviews and report around music, and is in the process of developing a music blog to catalogue and share her listening journey.
