The Free Black Women's Library

[The Free Black Women's Library]

TFBWL BOOKMAIL🖤⭐️☺️

Thank you dear book angel Grace Pickering for sending me two awesome soft covers written by Black women.

These two selections are two of my favorite reads and I’m super grateful to add them to our collection.

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, an incredible collection of short stories written by award winning British Nigerian writer Lesley Nneka Arimah and the breathtaking novel WHAT WE LOSE by the Zinzi Clemmons.

I deeply enjoyed both of these books!!!🤩🤩

Thank you so much for sending🖤🌹

[The Free Black Women's Library]

Shout out to my IG reading buddies

@crystalyogi22

@kiyannaloves

@kuetcwge

@sarahatlee

@womanistbibliophile and everyone else taking part in The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge this year. ♥️🌹📚♥️🌹📚♥️

2020 has had a lot going on, so it’s been a slow reading year for me.

Here is a stack of books I’ve read for the challenge this year so far.

Swipe to the last slide for TFBWL reading challenge details if you would like to take part.

I have enjoyed all of the books I have read so far, but I placed a star next to my favorites!!

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M. Broom - a debut ⭐️

MY LIFE AS AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH by Ibi Zoboi - a book for middle schoolers

SISTERS OF THE YAM/BLACK WOMEN AND SELF RECOVERY by bell hooks - a vintage Black Feminist text, published before 2000 ⭐️

GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardino Evaristo - a classic or award winning novel ⭐️

HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi - a book by an African author

THE WAR BEFORE by Safiya Bukhari - a book by a political activist or organizer ⭐️

SASSAFRAS, CYPRESS & INDIGO by Ntozake Shange - a book that centers relationships between women ⭐️

MY SOUL LOOKS BACK by Jessica B Harris - a memoir

BLACK LESBIAN IN WHITE AMERICA by Anita Cornwell

- non fiction LGBTQ ⭐️

IN THE WAKE by Christina Sharpe - a book on Spirituality, Religion or Ritual ⭐️

THE HEALING by Gayl Jones - a book that’s features Patois, Creole, Southern vernacular or slang ⭐️

BLACK IMAGINATION curated by Natasha Marin - a book of poetry/prose

Are you taking part in TFBWL Reading Challenge this year? If so let me know how it’s going and what good books by Black women you have read so far!!

Make sure to use the hashtags -

#TFBWL

#tfbwlreadingchallenge

#TFBWL2020

So I can see your posts and re-share them!!

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[The Free Black Women's Library]

The Free Black Women’s Library/ Three Books

[The Free Black Women's Library]

Friday blessings!!

New additions to The Free Black Women’s Library, some seriously excellent gently used award winning best selling reads, both classic and contemporary.

Super Grateful for this awesome bookstack, that was delivered this morning. ♥️👌🏿📚

Last time I counted there were 2500 #books in the library but it’s probably more like 3000 at this point. Our brilliance and creativity is truly infinite.

[The Free Black Women's Library]

“Toni Cade Bambara took up the politics of revolution, family, and knowledge production with decidedly less ambivalence than Murray. Her 1970 collection of essays, poetry, and cultural criticism, BLACK WOMAN, offered a resounding response to the cultural and intellectual discombobulation that had framed the works of Pierce and Cruse.”

“Bambara and her colleagues considered a range of issues relevant to Black women’s lives, turning them inside out, interrogating their relevance, discarding the ideas that were not useful and offering a new set of conceptual frames for thinking and writing about Black women’s lives and organizing for black liberation. Bambara and her comrades did not see Black women’s lives through the framework of a problem. Rather like Cooper, they looked at Black women’s lives and their embodied experience as a space of possibility.”

- 🤩⭐️🤩

Dr. Brittney Cooper in BEYOND RESPECTABILITY speaking on THE BLACK WOMAN/An Anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara.

I love when it feels like my books are talking to each other. When one book references another to make a point more salient and precise. This conversation on the range and scope of Black women intellectuals is especially rich and potent. 🤓💚

#blkfemfridays

[The Free Black Women's Library]

Our dearly beloved Toni Morrison joined the ancestors on this day one year ago. One of the greatest writers and thinkers of all time.

She is one of the main reasons I do this work of gathering, collecting, studying and sharing Black Women’s writing.

Still grieving for this loss, still grateful for all she taught through her words, life and legacy.

Her influence is infinite.

What is your favorite book by Toni Morrison?

What do you appreciate about her life and writing?

What has she taught you with her words?

Photo description: TFBWL Toni Morrison book altar at MOCADA Museum -@mocada_museum created for community gathering to honor the life of Toni Morrison. 🌹💚🌹💚🌹

[The Free Black Women's Library]

Beautiful Blessed Monday!!

Thank you so much to my dear sister friend Christa Bell for sending me this perfect Black magical bookmail 🖤🌹🖤🌹

THE HOODOO TAROT, a 78 card deck and book for RootworkersBy writer and tarot reader Tayannah Lee McQuillar celebrates the complex American rootwork tradition, and integrates esoteric and botanical knowledge from Hoodoo with the divination system of the tarot.

Structured like a traditional tarot deck, each of the 78 cards features full color paintings and elegantly interprets the classical tarot imagery through depictions of legendary rootworker past and present as well as important Hoodoo symbolism.

In the accompanying guidebook, the author and researcher provides a history of Hoodoo and it’s complex heritage, Including its roots in multiple African and Indigenous American ethnic groups as well as its European influences.

She explores the traditional forms of divination used by rootworkers, including oneiromancy, augury cartomancy, explaining how pairing the tarot with Hoodoo is a natural fit.

McQuillar shares the history of the rootworkers and symbol featured, associated magical plants, related scriptural quotes as well as guidance and advice on the card’s meaning.

This is a gift that was sent for me, and not the library, which rarely happens!! 😂

I’m so excited to dive into and learn more about these deep and sacred Black spiritual traditions.

And these cards are absolutely GORGEOUS!!

Now who wants a reading?! 😉🔮🌹♥️

[The Free Black Women's Library]

The Bridge Poem

by

Kate Rushin

I’ve had enough

I’m sick of seeing and touching

Both sides of things

Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody

Can talk to anybody

Without me

Right?

I explain my mother to my father

my father to my little sister

My little sister to my brother

my brother to the white feminist

The white feminist to the Black church folks

the Black church folks to the ex-hippies

the ex- hippies to the Black separatists

the Black separatist to the artists

the artist to my friends parents…

Then

I’ve got to explain myself

To everybody

I do more translating

Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it

I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinner

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world

Find something else to make you legitimate

Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood Your manhood

Your humanness

I’m sick of reminding you not to

Close off too tight for too long

I’m sick of mediating with your worst self On behalf of your better selves

I am sick

Of having to remind you

To breathe

Before you suffocate

Your own fool self

Forget it

Stretch or drown

Evolve or die

The bridge I must be

Is the bridge to my own power

I must translate

My own fears

Mediate my own weaknesses

I must be the bridge to nowhere

But my true self

And then

I will be useful

This perfect poem written by Kate Rushin is featured in the iconic anthology entitled THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa which features poetry, essays and analytical pieces written by Black, Latina and Native American women.

[The Free Black Women's Library]

Join The Free Black Women’s Library on Sunday, May 31 for “Shape God, Shape Self” - a very special virtual conversation with writers, scholars, professors and founders of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network Dr. Ayana Jamieson and Dr. Moya Bailey as we discuss part two of Butler’s iconic and prophetic series PARABLE OF THE TALENTS.

For those of you who were with us last month for part one of this series, were we talked about the lessons and the themes within PARABLE OF THE SOWER you know that conversation was lit 🔥🔥🔥

I am outrageously excited for this!!

Register via eventbrite link

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shape-god-shape-self-tickets-107077050340?utm_source=eventbrite&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=post_publish&utm_content=EBLinkEvent&utm_term=fullLink

Shape God, Shape Self

Parable of the Talents

Eventbrite