✏️🛠️ Being in a Literary Couple Is Every Writer’s Biggest Fear. But Spoiler: It’s Actually Pretty Great

We spoke to Nina Sharma and Quincy Scott Jones about Nina’s new book, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, how they inspire breakthroughs in one another and their ritual evening walks.

Photos courtesy Nina Sharma; collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

Fifteen years ago tomorrow on what they now call their meetaversary, writers Nina Sharma and Quincy Scott Jones met on their way to a Fourth of July party. More specifically, Nina was visiting their mutual friend in Philly and Quincy was their ride. Their bond was pretty immediate, the stuff of writerly dreams. Nina, a writer, teacher and comedian, was struck by a book she saw in the backseat of poet and professor Quincy’s car. What soon followed was their courtship and eventually their marriage. Their interracial relationship — Nina is Indian and Quincy is Black — is at the center of Nina’s first essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, which came out in May. Though the book consists of Nina’s voice and stories, Quincy plays such a major role that Nina had to figure out a way to write about him as honestly as she was writing about herself — and they both had to grapple with how they come across on the page.    

Also at the heart of their story, both visibly and behind the scenes, is the ways in which they collaborate. They have worked together on all sorts of things, from creating Blackshop, a column about allyship between BIPOC people, to the Nor’easter Exchange, a multicultural reading series dedicated to bringing diverse writers together. Nina’s presence is felt in Quincy’s work, as well (you’ll see). He is the author of two books of poetry, The T-Bone Series and How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children, and is currently working on a graphic narrative called Black Nerd about two college students at a fictional school set in the early ’90s. I’ve always been fascinated by couples making art together — how it works, why it works, when it’s hard and where the magic lies. I had the opportunity to speak to Nina and Quincy about their work together and apart, and to ask them questions like these and more.  

Jesse: Starting at the beginning, I love your meet-cute. You first met through your mutual friend and as soon as you got into Quincy’s car, you spied one of your favorite books, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. What were you thinking when you saw that? 

Nina: It was that thing of, “What is this man doing with this radical feminist book in his car?” I wanted to know that story.  

My editor and I worked on pulling in our relationship as fully as possible because I had become really comfortable writing about myself, but I was still very protective of bringing Quincy into the book. And my editor noticed that. So I started — this was actually Quincy’s idea — to think of us as characters. Quincy’s idea was to call us Harry and Sally, like from When Harry Met Sally, and I used that filter to start flushing out our whole story, him as much as me. As I was working on it and really starting to hit the sweet spot, my editor called it when Harry and Sally fell away and Nina and Quincy came in.