Nikki Woods in Voyage Dallas: Stories, Reinvention and Maroon House Press
Maroon House Press founder Nikki Woods is featured in Voyage Dallas’s “Conversations with Nikki Woods,” published on November 4, 2026. In the interview she talks about growing up between Kingston, Jamaica, and St. Louis, her years in national radio, starting over in midlife, and why she now spends her days building a press for Caribbean and diaspora stories.
If you have wondered who is behind Maroon House Press, and why the books look the way they do, the interview is a good place to start. Here is a short guide to what it covers, with links to where you can go next.
Table of Contents
From radio to publishing
Nikki was raised between Kingston and St. Louis and went to Howard University. She then spent more than a decade as an executive producer and on-air personality for the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show, which reached more than eight million listeners.
In the interview she describes what came next not as a change of career but as a return to parts of herself she had set aside. Media strategy, coaching, publishing and Caribbean heritage are, in her telling, the same work: finding stories that matter and getting them to the people who need them.
Starting over, honestly
The conversation does not pretend the road was smooth. Nikki talks about professional setbacks, financial insecurity, the particular difficulty of starting over in midlife, and learning publishing as a beginner. She also talks about learning to separate her worth from her productivity, a theme readers of Reinvention House Nonfiction will recognize.
Her conclusion is a practical one: whatever has happened, she believes we still get to decide what happens next.
The work now
Nikki describes her mission as helping people tell meaningful stories and reach the right audiences. The interview covers several strands of that work:
- Maroon House Press, the independent press publishing fiction and nonfiction rooted in Jamaican and Caribbean memory, history and folklore.
- Ground Truth, her investigative podcast.
- Her involvement with the Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology.
- The Reinvention Method, her coaching for accomplished women navigating a second act.
She also thanks the people who shaped her: her parents, her children, her former Tom Joyner Morning Show colleagues, and the writers, collaborators and clients she has worked with. Her family’s stories, she says, run through the work she does now.
Why it matters to the books
A press is shaped by the person who starts it. The interview makes clear why Maroon House Press publishes the way it does: Caribbean stories told from the inside, heritage guides for families tracing their Jamaican roots, and fiction that treats folklore, faith and history as lived experience rather than backdrop. For the founding story in Nikki’s own words, read why I started Maroon House Press.
Asked how she wants to be remembered, she says she is less interested in being remembered than in building things worth remembering. That is a fair description of what the press is trying to do, one book at a time.
Read more
Read the full interview at Voyage Dallas. To learn more about Nikki’s work and writing, visit her author page, or browse the full catalog on our books page.
