Written in the Waters

“Journalist Roberts considers the costs of the global slave trade and its impact on her own family in her engrossing debut. During a 2017 visit to Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Roberts saw a photo of Black scuba divers exploring sunken slave ships. A placard identified the divers as members of the underwater archaeology collective Diving with a Purpose. Moved to join the group in searching “faraway lands right here on Earth” to “tell unknown and untold stories about one of the darkest moments of human history,” Roberts accompanied the divers to shipwrecks off the coasts of South Africa and Costa Rica and slave auction sites in Benin and Togo. As she documents her travels, Roberts sharply reflects on how the transatlantic slave trade led to a “justification for systemic racism,” and catalogs its reverberations within her family tree; in one memorable section, she visits North Carolina and learns that her formerly enslaved great-grandfather took possession of 174 acres of land there after the Civil War. Roberts matches a reporter’s meticulousness with a memoirist’s emotional attunement, delivering a sweeping survey of slavery’s repercussions. It’s a must-read.”—Publisher’s Weekly starred review “Tara Roberts is a pioneer and an inspiration. Her work does not so much ‘unearth’ the past as pull it respectfully out of the depths of the sea and the shadows of history. I am deeply moved by this book, and by her journey.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love “Written in the Waters will be forever written on my soul. Tara Roberts is fearless yet vulnerable; adventurous yet grounded. This memoir does the hard, necessary work of generational healing. With her words, she charts a path to spiritual renewal.”—Tayari Jones, New York Times best-selling author of An American Marriage“Tara Roberts’ Written in the Waters is a gift—a visceral exploration of the submersed history of the Middle Passage through the eyes of an intrepid, feminist world traveler. In lyrical prose, her riveting account of the history of sunken slave ships—as she negotiates the challenges of midlife—makes this book an indelible read and a significant contribution to Black literary life.”—Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of What Truth Sounds Like“Tara Roberts is a force of nature and a beautiful storyteller. Written in the Waters is deeply personal and moving: a tale of identity and conviction.”—Robin Roberts, co-anchor, Good Morning America

Tara Roberts is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who documents shipwrecks that once carried captive Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. Their stories-and the stories of the divers, historians, archaeologists, and communities she meets along the way-became the podcast series Into the Depths, which has been featured in more than 200 media outlets. Tara is a TED Ignite Fellow at the 2025 TED conference. In 2022, Roberts became the first Black female explorer to grace the cover of National Geographic magazine and was named the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. A former Fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, she has worked as an editor for publications including Essence and CosmoGirl, published her own magazine, and edited several books for girls. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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