fascinated

Welcome! I’m Marcella White Campbell, author of Maya’s Journey.

I am always in the midst of discovering something. A spotlight beams down on a concept, an item, or a song, and it fascinates me, becoming the intense and passionate focus of my attention. I follow it for weeks—sometimes years—until it bleeds into the rest of my life.

A rotating cast of these fascinations has shaped my entire life: knitting, global Jewish history, a cappella music, 18th-century London, niche perfumes, Mussar, gumbo. I design creativity workshops that integrate sensory experience with making and learning. I have written more than a million words of fiction set in worlds I built and still visit. I write essays about Black and Jewish identity, family history, and contemporary culture.

Maya’s Journey: A Story of Two Great-Grandmothers grew out of one of those fascinations. Twenty-five years of genealogy research helped me to find my grandmother’s lost lineage, tracing our history back to one of our first enslaved ancestors—and, later, helped me to follow breadcrumbs back to my husband’s Romanian great-grandmother. Maya’s Journey is a picture book about a child tracing versions of those two great-grandmother journeys—one through the Jim Crow South, one from Romania—and discovering that her Black-and-Jewish family story is much, much larger than she imagined.

My work has appeared in Lilith, Kveller, and The Forward. I direct the Pomegranate Writing Fellowship at the Jewish Women’s Archive, supporting Jewish women writers of color, and previously led Be’chol Lashon, a nonprofit dedicated to global Jewish diversity.

This substack is where I situate all of it in my own experience. Sometimes the fascination is historical, sometimes sensory, and sometimes deeply personal. They are all part of the same project.