“A Gathering of Champions”: A Conversation with the Billops-Hatch Archives Advisory Board

This conversation with the Billops-Hatch Advisory Board for Emory University’s Rose Library was convened by board member Miriam J. Petty. It provides insight into the far-ranging community that James Hatch and Camille Billops cultivated in their forty+ years of making, preserving, brokering, chronicling, and promoting Black visual, literary, dramatic, and intermedial arts from their loft-home-studio-archive in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. Scholars and moviegoers who have encountered Billops and Hatch solely in terms of their films may find the conversation surprising for its interdisciplinary and intermedial points of reference and influence. It offers a sense of their impact across multiple spheres of cultural life, providing important context and a more complete sense of their stature to readers of this special issue. The conversation also testifies to Camille’s and James’s interconnected personal and political aims, and their creation of a vibrant community of care among unapologetic champions of Black creativity.