Homeplace Poems: on Black Feminist Interior Design and Liberatory Living

This piece is part of our “Critical Creative Series,” in which, once a semester, a regular or guest author adopts a creative form (literary, visual, or audio) to reflect a strain of critical inquiry in the medical and health humanities. . . . introduction As a 2024 Poet-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora…

Black Feminist Healing Arts: A Making of Pedagogy and Praxis

BLACK FEMINIST HEALING ARTS: A MAKING OF PEDAGOGY AND PRAXIS   . . . – the inception –   It was Summer 2020, at the height of the pandemic, amidst erupting waves of Black grief. And there I was, sittin’ up in my room, preparing to teach my very first university course amidst a global…

the dear asüghara series: part three

  what would it mean to learn love for multiplicity  from the site of black girl longing? [This Series is a conversation between my interior and the interior of Ada, Freshwater’s protagonist. As a Black girl who, at times, has experienced multiple selves, I allow my messy insides to narrate a semi-fictional account that reflects…

the dear asughara series: part two

what would it mean to write madness from the site of black girl interior?  [This Series is a conversation between my interior and the interior of Ada, Freshwater’s protagonist. As a Black girl who, at times, has experienced multiple selves, I allow my messy insides to narrate a semi-fictional account that reflects my spiritual experience…

the dear asughara series: part one

[ This experimental essay series is a poetic response to Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, an autobiographical novel about a Nigerian girl who struggles with spiritual gifts, multiple selves, madness, and trauma that lead her into and out of self destruction. Freshwater ruptures Western notions of mental illness and honors the metaphysical realities of young women across…