Happy Sunday Loves!!
I’m in an art exhibit that opens this Thursday 2/20 6p - 8p, if you are in the Harlem area, please feel free to stop by and say 👋🏿- it’s on the gorgeous City College campus in their archive library’s art gallery, how perfectly poetically appropriate 😉📚 -
THE OTHER UTOPIAS will be up until 3/5!!
(It’s on the 5th floor of the library and there are stairs and elevator for those in need)
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#harlem #library #citycollege #blackwomenauthors
Weathering Out
She liked mornings, the best – Thomas gone to look for work, her coffee flushed with milk,
outside autumn trees blowsy and dripping. Past the seventh month she couldn’t see her feet
so she floated from room to room, houseshoes flapping, navigating corners in wonder. When she leaned
against the door jamb to yawn, she disappeared entirely.
Last week they had taken a bus at dawn to the new airdock. The hanger slid open in segments
and the zeppelin nosed forward in its silver envelope. The men walked it out gingerly, like a poodle,
then tied it to a mast and went back inside. Beulah felt just that large and placid, a lake;
she glistened from cocoa butter smoothed in when Thomas returned every evening nearly
in tears. He lean ear on her belly and say: Little fellow’s really talking,
though to her it was more of the Pok Pok Pok of a finger nail tapping a thick cream lampshade.
Sometimes during the night she woke up and found him asleep there and the child sleeping, too.
The coffee was good but too little, outside everything shivered in tinfoil – only the clover
between the cobblestones hung stubbornly on,
green as an afterthought…
💖💖💖💘
a forever fave from a forever fave
SELECTED POEMS by Rita Dove
Good morning!!
Just want to say thank you to everyone who supports and appreciates this project and page!! Thank you for your likes, comments, DMs and all the good and loving energy you send my way. Thank you so much for all the awesome books by Black women you send me, drop off and trade in. Thank you so much to the folks who come to the library each month and engage with the material and many activities being offered. Thank you to those who have started TFBWL branches in your area. Thank you especially to the patrons who give funds towards the growth and sustainability of this project every month through Patreon, I would not be able to keep this going without your financial contributions!! Recently I attempted to get funding from an organization that claims to give money to public practice social engagement community building type projects, multiple people told me to apply for the big money they were offering not just cause they know I needed it, but also cause they felt TFBWL was a perfect fit, but guess what!! they said this work does not have enough social impact and that I need to be doing more to get their dollars. 🤔
Their response gave me pause, because I thought of all of you and the hundreds of people who come to the library every month, the Black girl bookworms who spend the entire day at the library, the educators who create curriculum and reading lists based on the library’s collection, the Black women who feel excited and affirmed when they see over a thousand books written by people who look like them about things they care about, the writers who feel inspired and open, the elders who lift me up and praise my efforts, the folks who come in looking for a very specific book and always always find it, all of those who tell me they feel liberated, creative and joyful just being in the space. This all feels good and impactful to me, so I had to let go of their opinion that I’m not doing enough and just continue on, focus on what feels good and just be thankful. I am filled with gratitude. 🖤
I am deeply thrilled by these unique and important contributions to The Free Black Women’s Library book collection. Six precious books written by the iconic Nigerian author Flora Nwapa!! Known as the mother of modern African literature, her first novel EFURU was published in 1966, a poet, playwright, novelist, professor, child advocate and activist who achieved international fame through her many books. She also founded her own publishing company, entitled Tana Press in 1979.
Here we have six of her popular works
WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT,
ONE IS ENOUGH,
EFURU,
WIVES AT WAR,
NEVER AGAIN, and
CASSAVA SONG AND RICE.
Although Nwapa never identified as a Womanist or Feminist, she definitely explored and wrote on the themes of women’s empowerment and gender equity in her work. She lifted up and acknowledged the contributions of African women with art, cultural, social and political movements. She was a literary titan.
I’m excited to add these gems to the library’s Africana, West section, the covers and content of each one has me like 😭😭 I’m tempted to read each one ASAP. 🖤🇳🇬🖤 🇳🇬
Posted two sweet perks for the patrons on the TFBWL Patreon this week.
The Free Black Women’s Library Podcast - I had so much fun talking to @rbg728 about the stellar fiasco that was the binge worthy Hulu series - Little Fires Everywhere - what a world of busy bodies - burn baby burn…… we could have easily talked for hours about the mess of layers and themes explored in this story. It’s sooooo much 📺 🌟🔥
also open level yoga on Sunday at noon via Zoom.
Stretch, Breathe & Feel w/me 🧘🏾♂️ 🖤🧘🏾♂️
I am so grateful for the support of my patrons, most especially now - THANK YOU!! 💖💖💖
Pledge anywhere from $2 to $50 a month to support my work and gain access.
Please share and sign my petition to have Facebook remove the ban from my account for The Free Black Women’s Library.
(The Free Black Women’s Library)
My first podcast, a extension of The Free Black Woman’s Library.
Thank you so much to our sweet speculative sci fi babes over at @blfpress for sending us copies of their mystical and lovely new releases.
GOD’S WILL AND OTHER LIES, a story collection by journalist, teacher and award winning playwright Penny Mickelbury
and BLACK FROM THE FUTURE a 22 piece anthology of prose and poetry that spans across horror, fantasy, magical realism and Afro futurism all written by Black women writers.
Thank you for blessing us now and always with gorgeous and dreamy literary content. We LOVE y’all and are super excited to add these gems to the stacks!!!🖤📚🖤📚🖤📚🖤
Sarah M Broom’s THE YELLOW HOUSE is a stunning debut memoir about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a neglected New Orleans neighborhood. In 1961, Sarah M Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, a fiercely determined and recently widowed nineteen year old, invested her life savings in a shot gun house in the then promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. It was the height of the Space Race and the area was home to a major NASA plant. The optimism of postwar America seemed endless. In the Yellow House, Ivory Mae and her second husband, Simon Broom, who would be Sarah’s father, built domestic tranquility one wobbly renovation at a time, their dreams perpetually under construction. The family would eventually number 12 children. When Simon died, 6 months after Sarah’s birth, the house became Ivory Mars 13th and most unruly child.
A brilliant interweaving of reporting and gorgeously rendered family lore, this book tells the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a daughter who left home only to be continually pulled back, even after the House was wiped off the map by Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House is described as a touching tribute to family and a unique exploration of the human experience.
Thank you so much to my sweet dear friend (and literal rock star) @tamar_kali for gifting this wonderful book to me for The Free Black Women’s Library book collection. I love the cover, title and descriptor!! I love memoirs, I love New Orleans!! I can already sense this book’s beauty and significance is deep. I’ve heard nothing but god things about this one, and I’m really looking forward to reading it!! 💙❣️💙❣️💙
TFBWL BOOKMAIL ♥️🌹
Thank you so much to my lovely friends at @thenewpress for sending me a copy of MOUTHS OF RAIN/AN ANTHOLOGY OF BLACK LESBIAN THOUGHT edited by Briona Simone Jones.
“African-American and Afro Diasporic lesbian writers and theorists have made extra ordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. MOUTHS OF RAIN, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s classic WORDS OF FIRE, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black lesbian writers, spanning the 19th century through the 21st century. Using “Black lesbian” as a capacious signifiers, MOUTHS OF RAIN includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who who have self identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptive that disrupts and critique of capitalism, hetero sexism, and hetero patriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, MOUTHS OF RAIN addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-Blackness while also attending to love, romance, “coming out”, and the erotic.”
This gorgeous collection features many of my favorite writers, brilliant literary wonders like Alice Walker, Pamela Sneed, JP Howard, Cheryl Clarke, Jewelle Gomez, Moya Bailey, Pauli Murray, Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Demita Frazier and Pat Parker!!! 🔥🌹🔥🌹🔥