In support of her new memoir, Finding Home (November 2025, Agate Publishing) join author and actor Denise Nicholas in conversation with journalist Christopher Benson.
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In Finding Home, Nicholas highlights her familial turmoil and early career successes. Born in 1944 Detroit, Nicholas writes of growing up bookish, intelligent, and insecure, learning early on that, as a young Black woman, she lived “in a country that will neither celebrate your looks or your brains unless you work hard all the time.” Full of rigorous introspection, Nicholas writes about entrenched American racism, “a hatred that ebbs and flows like a river that has no end.”
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Three-time Golden Globe nominee and four-time NACCP Image Award winner Nicholas also spills plenty of ink about her career in film & TV on shows such as Room 222, In the Heat of the Night and Ghost Dad. She began acting with the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi and Louisiana during the Civil Rights Movement and was an original member of the famed Negro Ensemble Company in New York.
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Nicholas also wrote six episodes of In the Heat of the Night, which were produced for air. Her first novel, Freshwater Road, was voted a Best Book of 2005 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Detroit Free Press and Newsday — and was awarded the 2005 First Novelist Award from the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. The Ebell of L.A. launched Freshwater Road with a full-house book party in 2005, with guests such as the late Sidney Poitier and NCIS producer Charles F. Johnson in attendance.
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As a journalist, Christopher Benson was the Washington editor for Ebony magazine, city hall reporter in Chicago for WBMX-FM, and a contributor for The Chicago Reporter, writing a weekly online column on justice, race and media issues. He is currently a Professor of Journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School.
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With Mamie Till-Mobley, Benson co-authored Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America(Random House), about the historically significant 1955 lynching of Till-Mobley's son, Emmett Till, which won the 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Special Recognition — on which the 2022 limited television series, Women of the Movement, and a companion documentary were based. Benson served as a consultant on the series.
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His latest published work, co-authored with the Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr., A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till, (One World/Penguin Random House), will serve as source material for a documentary executive produced by Dick Wolf (Law and Order) — on which Benson will also be a producer. Benson currently serves on the board of directors of the non-profit Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute. He is a member of the Facing History Board of Scholars and is a senior advisor for the Chicago History Museum (Chicago Historical Society).

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