We recently connected with Sabin Prentis Duncan and have shared our conversation below.

Sabin Prentis , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

My publishing company, Fielding Books, produces written art that depicts the lives of overlooked segments of African-American culture—particularly Black men who earnestly love Black women and support Black families.

Our work is important. African American culture is as multifaceted as it is beautiful. Too often, popular media amplifies slivers of the culture with limited context, and that has pernicious effects on the younger generation. They see these distorted and unhealthy, at worst, significantly limited, at best, depictions of the culture and accept it as their truth. For example, two popular distortions are presenting African-American culture as having started in slavery and that the enslaved were somehow better off after being kidnapped and brutalized; yet, pre-colonial African empires are saddeningly overlooked or minimized. As an educator, parent, and human being, I would be complicit in the misrepresentation if I did nothing. Fielding Books is a platform to counter misinformation and tell the layered, engaging, and inspiring stories of overlooked human beings.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of my story is my effort to maximize the opportunities my parents, Fred and Joanne Duncan, sacrificed for my brother and I to experience.

Embedded within their sacrifice was the notion that the fruits of their sacrifice were not for me to hoard but to share and uplift others. With that guiding ethos, I became a teacher. In fact, teaching kindergarten provided some of my most rewarding years! As an effective educator, I am a lifelong learner. Lifelong learner is an overwrought cliché’, yet in the nuance of my truth, it consists of continuously growing beyond my comfort zone. Professionally, I grew from teacher to principal to faith-based organization administration to higher education. Personally, I grew as a man, husband, and father.

Yet, in all that growth, my spirit felt confined. Becoming an author and publisher gave my life more room to breathe.

Initially, I ran an educational consulting company where, during some workshops, I sold copies of my first book, a compilation of some of my blog posts. Fortunately, after returning to my alma mater, Hampton University, to work under my mentor-hero, Dr. Freddye Davy, I developed a friendship/brotherhood with Ran Walker. Ran is a prolific writer and professor. Not only did he encourage me to write fiction, but he also co-authored my first published fiction. He was a guiding force in my career as a writer and publisher.

My evolution as a writer has bloomed into ten published works that I authored or co-authored. It is also a catalyst for my entrepreneurial ambitions and experiments in growing a business. Writing the stories is fun. Creating the books and marketing them is a different type of work. This evolution continues as I coach aspiring authors from idea to independently published work. Specific coaching services range from editing to ghostwriting, from interior formatting to cover design, and guidance to cheerleading. In many ways, my clients’ sense of accomplishment is as heartwarming as those five-year-olds I taught how to read.

Overall, an unanticipated blessing was the impact my creative and entrepreneurial journey has had on my daughters. They have witnessed me writing. They have listened to me discuss ideas and seen those ideas morph into published art. They have participated in book-signing activities. Now they actively contribute to the creation of art. Moreover, I can pass Fielding Books to them as a tangible revenue source and creative platform for their unique contributions to the world.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

As a hard-of-hearing human, my life requires resilience.

This hereditary disability has shaped my personality and definitely heightening my natural introversion. I did not start wearing hearing aids until I was in my 30s and got them so that my then five-year-old eldest daughter did not have to go through the experience of wearing hearing aids alone. Time has proven that she was more of an inspiration for me in accepting the hearing aids than I was to her.

I struggled to hear throughout my schooling. In college, I simply read entire textbooks as an adaptive behavior. My most developed adaptive behavior is lip-reading. Because lip-reading requires invested focus, my listening skills far surpass my hearing—LOL! Seriously though, lip-reading and receiving “messages” from alternate mediums—tone, expressions, body language, etc.—have significantly developed my sense of perception and increased my own self-awareness.

Conveying these mediums of interpretation enriches my writing. Readers frequently compliment how real my characters are and how they could “see” things as they occurred. Now that I am fifty, I have more moments of acceptance and grace than of discouragement and sadness.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One lesson that I continue to unlearn is the necessity of working for someone else. Entrepreneurship provides jolts of accomplishment that make the revenue even sweeter. I am still growing along the entrepreneurial path even as I hold a day job doing work that I enjoy. In some ways, having a day job absolves my entrepreneurial journey of the stress of making money to live and allows me to grow steadily in crafting art from which I am compensated.

Whether it is Fielding Books or my day job, being fully present in work I enjoy provides special fulfillment. One differing greatly from the drudgery of having to do unenjoyable work, shaped by my blue-collar upbringing. I suppose that means I am unlearning always being an employee, unlearning that we have to do work we do not like, and unlearning the scarcity-based relationship with money. While I am naming these things, the unlearning is active, and the learning of new ways of living is enriching.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fieldingbooks.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sabinprentis/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SabinPrentis/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinduncanphd
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Sabin+Prentis
• Other: Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sabin-Prentis/author/B00R8YKS0I?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1737732357&sr=8-1&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Image Credits

Shamara of Xaviar Media