Three Shows You Already Know Are Up for a Black Pod Award This Month

The Black Pod Awards ceremony hits downtown Oakland on September 26, and the public voting round that closed last week pulled from every corner of Black podcasting: relationship advice shows, comedy recaps, gossip roundups, music-industry sit-downs. Podcast of the Year alone put Joe and Jada up against Normal Gossip and Ernest Owens' Ernestly Speaking!, three shows that don't sound anything alike and don't share an audience, which is kind of the point. Three of the shows in the running are ones we've been tracking in the directory for a while, and their nominations are a good excuse to go back and hear why.

Joe and Jada, up for Podcast of the Year

Fat Joe and Jadakiss spent decades as rap peers before they became co-hosts, and Joe and Jada runs on that history. The show drops twice a week through iHeartPodcasts and The Volume, and the guest list reads like a who's who of people who've lived through four decades of hip-hop: Master P walked through the entire arc of Cash Money, No Limit, and his 2026 tour plans, and Mario sat down to talk about opening for Chris Brown and Usher on their stadium run alongside the state of R&B right now. The show also runs a recurring segment called The Real Report, where guests like Tony Yayo and Uncle Murda break down whatever's dominating hip-hop discourse that week, most recently the Keefe D verdict and the ongoing N.O.R.E.-DJ Vlad fallout. What makes it work isn't the guest list on paper, it's that Fat Joe and Jadakiss actually know these people, so the conversations skip the publicist-approved small talk and go straight to the stories.

MrGentleman Lifestyle Podcast, also up for Podcast of the Year

Ken, who goes by MrGentleman, has been running his show independently since long before "lifestyle podcast" became a crowded category, and MrGentleman Lifestyle Podcast has racked up nearly 280 episodes on the strength of that consistency. New episodes land every Sunday and Thursday, and the format flexes between personal-story interviews and spinoff series like The Old School Show and Date Nite Talk. The most recent one, Episode 195 with Brittany Cash on the art of creating stories, is a solid entry point if you haven't heard the show before. What earned it a nomination alongside a Fat Joe and Jadakiss production says something about how the Black Pod Awards actually judges things: reach doesn't automatically beat a host who shows up twice a week, year after year, without a network behind him.

Sista Brunch, up for Best Podcast Cover Art

Sista Brunch is hosted by Fanshen Cox, a playwright, producer, and co-author of the Inclusion Rider, the industry standard that Frances McDormand announced from the Oscars stage back in 2018. That background shows up in how the show is built: it's specifically about the working lives of Black women in film and entertainment, not celebrity gossip about them. The current run, called Celebration Interviews, pairs up guests for conversations about their careers, and the most recent volume brought on Diana Williams to talk about making stories in an attention economy. An earlier volume paired Candace Nicholas-Lippman and c. Craig Patterson on Valley seasons, Viola Davis, and not staying down. Sista Brunch already picked up a Webby nomination before this one, so the cover art nod isn't the show's first recognition, but it's a nice reminder that the visual identity matters as much as who's on the mic.

Why this matters beyond the trophy

None of these three shows have big ad budgets or a marketing team pushing them into your feed. They got nominated because the Black Pod Awards, a 501(c)(3) built specifically to spotlight Black podcasting, put judges behind the work instead of leaving it to whichever show already has the biggest following. The Best Podcast Cover Art category alone tells you how wide the net gets cast: Sista Brunch is up against A Moment with Erik Fleming, Beards Bourbon Whiskey Podcast, Creatively Eccentric, The Secret Life of TK Dutes, What In The Black History, and Yahweh's Money, shows built by teams of every size imaginable.

Public voting for four categories ran through September 7. The full nominee slate, a separate list from the voting candidates and decided by judge scores, comes out after Labor Day, ahead of the ceremony in Oakland on the 26th. Tables and tickets are already on sale for anyone local enough to show up in person.

If you've got twenty minutes today, pick one of the three episodes linked above and actually listen. That's a better vote of confidence than anything cast on a ballot.