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Five women officers of the Womenβs League in Newport, Rhode Island, c.1899.
Photo courtesy US Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. Previously displayed as part of the American Negro exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900. βοΈ
#mondaymuse
#Blackwomahood
#TFBWL
#freeblackwomenslibrary
#thefreeblackwomenslibrary
@kiyannaloves got two of my faves last Sunday at The Free Black Women’s Library!! Major score, yay!!😍😍
#books #bookstagram #bookswap #goodreads #blackbooks #BlackBookwormsMatter #blackwomanbibliophile #freeblackwomenslibrary 📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚
#Repost @kiyannaloves (@get_repost)
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So excited about these two books I got at @thefreeblackwomenslibrary session today at the Studio Museum in Harlem! There were so many great books and awesome people 📖✨
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Happy Pub Day to Mecca Jamilah Sullivan!! ππ
I am looking forward to reading and discussing this one!! I first discovered Meccaβs Black Feminist scholarly work via a presentation she did on the legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, and became a fan pretty instantly. ππ€
RP: @meccajamilah Itβs pub day! The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora is officially in the world! If you love & think about queerness, language, and Black feminist living, this book wants to talk to you.
From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black womenβs queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black womenβs literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.
Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black womenβs writing.
TFBWL BOOKMAILππ
A very generous book angel sent me a box of books that contained some vintage beauties!!
π€©ππ¦π€©π€ΈπΏββοΈππ
I LOVE MYSELF WHEN I AM LAUGHING AND THEN AGAIN WHEN IM LOOKING MEAN AND IMPRESSIVE/A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker, introduction by Mary Helen Washington, published by The Feminist Press, 1979
PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E Butler, published by Grand Central Publishing, 1993
IN LOVE & TROUBLE/Stories of Black Women by Alice Walker, published by Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1967
FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF/Choreopoem by Ntozake Shange, published by Bantam Books, 1980
IF THEY COME IN THE MORNING by Angela Y. Davis and other Political Prisoners, published by Signet,1971
THE BLACK FAMILY DINNER QUILT COOKBOOK with Dorothy Height, President & The National Council of Negro Women, Inc.
SOME OF US DID NOT DIE/New & Selected Essays by June Jordan, published by Basic/Civitas Books, 2002
Such a glorious stack of heavy hitters, whew!! Absolutely incredible!!
So much gratitude to the person that sent these treats and so much more for The Free Black Womenβs Library book collection. ππβ₯οΈ
Iβm hyped to share that with our community via our traveling installation and upcoming Reading Room. π€ΈπΏββοΈπ€π¦π
Feel free to send all manner of good books written by Black women and Black non binary folks to us at
TFBWL
1072 Bedford Avenue
Box 39
Brooklyn, NY 11216
We are also grateful for zines, chapbooks, comic books, graphic novels, journals and self published works.
Thank you!! π€
*Collage in the background created by me.

βHoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion. It has its thousands of secret adherents. It adapts itself like Christianity to its locale, reclaiming some of its borrowed characteristics to itself, such as fire worship as signified in the Christian church by the altar and the candles and the belief in the power of water to sanctify as in baptism. Belief in magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.β - an excerpt from MULES AND MEN, Β© 1935 βοΈ
Looking forward to sharing my favorite Hoodoo Stories gathered by novelist, folklorist, legendary anthropologist and TFBWL muse Zora Neale Hurston on Sunday, October 31 at our next TFBWL session in honor of Hoodoo Heritage Month.
Join us at The Plaza at 300 Ashland in Fort Greene, Brooklyn for a special collaboration with our friends from The Center of Fiction.
Folks are welcome to come dressed as their favorite author or character to compete for prizes, as well as bring good books written by Black women to trade with the collection from noon to 5.
See you then!!
“The historical formation of surveillance is not outside of the historical formation of slavery.”
- Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness" by Simone Browne
I need someone else to read this book so we can take about it cause it’s blowing my mind and also creeping me out a little bit.
In it Simone talks about how surveillance technologies and practices are racialized, and claims the Black body as a key site of specific conditions that include being monitored and controlled most especially in a Western context. She cites historic examples and offers creating and #creativity as modes of resistance. She talks about everything from branding during times of slavery to the prison industrial complex to facial recognition software to being patted down by TSA. It’s detailed, dense and extremely well written!!
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”
“The Salt Eaters” by Toni Cade Bambara 🖤📚
Talk to me about your wellness practices and rituals of self care.
mine involve smelly baths, skullcap tea, gazing at art, stars and flowers.
What do you do to stay & feel well? 🤔💕👌🏾
“Everything about the place was designed to make you feel part of a community, but at night, in my twin bed, I felt a loneliness so complete it made my teeth hurt. A loneliness like grief, as if I were missing somebody who has died and would never come back.”
Symptomatic by Danny Senna 💫👌🏾
Book 22 - The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge 📚💕🙌🏾📚💕🙌🏾
Over the weekend I read this urban fiction drama about a young multiracial woman writer trying to make a life for herself in New York City. She confronts the complications of being a lone woman of color in a city that emphasizes and feeds her isolation and sadness, this leads to her forming dangerous and desperate relationships. City life and its characters can be incredibly debilitating, and even more so for a quiet and withdrawn woman of color who has no idea who she is, what she needs or wants. Danny shares how and why in a way that is matter of fact, scary, poignant and accurate.
























