COMING SOON!

Outside of Honor: Black Motherverse & Queer BlackBoySpeak is a poetic memoir and meditation on the primacy of the black feminine in African-American life. It considers the centrality of the black feminine to black belonging, home, and healing.

Recounting my family history and what I know of the lived experiences of my three “mothers” (aka, my birth mother and her two sisters), I labor in these verses to empathize, forgive, align with, and affirm their experiences, particularly the parts they themselves considered outside of honorable mention.

Many of the pieces of my family history weren’t discussed until my elders, advanced in age and ill, chose to share them as their lives were fading. Those revelations helped me understand myself and to heal. They also inspired a desire to stitch together their beautiful tapestries of black womanhood as I experienced their presence and came to know their origin stories.

OOH massages the wounds of history with the kindness of undying love to tell the story of my wings—the freedoms I now know and enjoy because of the three women (and one queer man) who fought their way through time before me, the gifts of their difference that imprinted me, and the enduring and endless possibilities of home they constructed in my heart.

I am currently completing the manuscript for publication.