Archives

She carries the dark seed / sown in her tiny wrinkled brain / before she was born.

Your children ask for their birth stories / and you sew a more dazzling quilt each time.

“Grimoire hones in on maternal health and labor—the physical and psychic work it takes to bear and rear Black children.”

When she was an infant, I would cup her tiny feet in my hands, close my fingers around them, and make them disappear.

The tiny house has a force field around it, because it must.

It was a routine visit, but my heart was cartwheeling in anticipation of a test I couldn’t study for.

Despite my efforts, Mom’s drinking problem seeped through until I could no longer hide the stain.

Seconds and Inches is a deeply introspective memoir about the ways in which trauma can move through a family and how, despite the impact and the suffering, one woman sought out love, connection, and gratitude to reclaim her life.

This is the story of domestic violence homicide, the immediate victims, yes but also the riptide that tears through the lives of those left behind.

A Finalist in the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies tells the fraught and aching stories of church-going black women wrestling with their desires.

An evocative collection as diverse as the mother-writers featured, My Caesarean explores and exposes the realities of C-sections with raw honesty and visceral beauty, and opens wide the conversation about surgical births.