Curated links. Favorite Flash Fiction I Read This Week: Your Mother Imagines You Dead (Via Fracture Lit) Favorite Short Fiction I Read This Week: What It’s Worth Giving Up to Stay in a Family (Via Electric Lit) Useful Article on Writing: Good Enough Is Just Fine, More To That A Book I’m Currently Reading: Aggie Jordan’s memoir A …
Category: Black women
The ABC of My Kinky Hair, Mystery Novels That Examine Race, and the Best Way To Wash Your Face
Curated links. Favorite Essays I Read This Week: Afros, Braids, Cornrows: Embracing the ABC of my Kinky Hair, Iris Leona Marie Cross Mourning the Loss of My Dad — and His Jeep (Via The Cut) Favorite Flash Fiction I Read This Week: Unnecessary Things, Tatyana Tolstaya Favorite Writing Advice I Read This Week: 17 Steps to Accelerate …
When the Shooting Stops, 10 Black Twitter Moments, and the Ge’ez Calendar
Curated links. Favorite Article I Read This Week: Inconsolable Loss and Overpowering Damage Useful Article on Focusing More on the Things That Matter to You: In Your Own Way, Oliver Burkeman Useful Article on Writing (especially if you write short stories or novels): The 22 Rules of Storytelling, according to Pixar A Book I’m Currently …
Courageous Discomfort, Journey to a Promised Land, and 13 Months in a Year
Reading lists. Favorite Book on Race I Read This Month: Courageous Discomfort: How to Have Important, Brave, Life—Changing Conversations about Race and Racism. Books like White Fragility and How To Be An Antiracist discuss how to have uncomfortable conversations with white people. But there is something unique about Courageous Discomfort, a book on race and racism written by a Black …
I’m Exhausted by People Thinking the Reason I’m Sitting in a Senior Room Is That I’m Black,
NOT That I’m Excellent At My Job At Beshale hotel, in Addis Ababa, I met a Friend of a friend for Ethiopian Coffee. This Friend of a friend was a white man in his late 30s. In our conversation, what position I am at the institute I work for came up. When I said I’m …
Friends Suggest To Bombard My Online Harasser’s Email With Obscene Text Bubbles, But I Won’t
Let us avoid resorting to avoid ourselves. First, he started flirting during zoom meetings. The flirtation escalated to taking screenshots of me. Then he circulated my picture among his friends and emailed me sexually explicit statements. I stood in the middle of my kitchen, powerless and hurt, my body shivered as if my online harasser …
This Precious Dark Skin
A memory told completely in poetic verse. Powerlessness your voice silenced, wrecked gutted hunched body numb body utter absence of any feeling creeps up your spine like an army of spiders. A white workspace under a spotlight, everybody breathing down your neck, suffocating, people sitting on a chair formulating a circle around your workplace looking …
Adera – A New Short Fiction
My hand trembles as I comb my Afro hair with a sturdy comb my husband gave me when our daughter was born. The comb drops on the floor. I get down to pick it up. Limbs that allowed me to get down and stand up over eight decades betray me. My body folds onto the …
A Letter To My Black Friend Crumbling Under the Weight of the ‘Strong Black Woman’ Cape
And to you if you’re carrying the pervasive stereotype on your shoulders. You’re crumbling under the weight of the ‘strong black woman’ cape. Your colleagues didn’t ask you, “How are you doing?” They heard about your recent online sexual harassment. And yet. How you are sleeping at night and if you’re even sleeping at night, …
‘I’m Not Sure That You’re Quite Princeton Material,’ – Lyrical Essay
You’re supposed to accomplish less and succeed less than everyone else. In the eighth episode of The First Lady TV series, a young Michelle Robinson (the now Michelle Obama) sits on the edge of her seat in her guidance counselor’s office, waiting for the counselor to finish reading her school records. A few minutes later, the white …