As the wheels continue to fly off my personal life, moments of simple joy and normalcy are increasingly hard to come by. My son’s unexpected visit home this week promised to be an opportunity to simply be present with family and savor the simple joys of [...]
I am a New Yorker. Ever since 9-11, I have felt like I have an X on my back. This feeling does not replace the vulnerability I feel as a Black woman in the United States. It increases it. It grows my unease, my dis-ease. [...]
My friend hurled those words out, mid-rant, on the ride home from a very poorly planned fund raiser. We had purchased tickets in support of a scholarship fund for high-school seniors who had “overcome life-changing obstacles to achieve academic success.” As doctoral students who had [...]
I was four years old the first time that I was called nigger. It was my first day at Athens Preschool Academy. APA — who feels like writing Athens Preschool Academy over and over again — was — is I think — located on the Atlanta Highway in my hometown. It had a [...]
There’s a reason why, when a woman whispers her story of sexual abuse, when she writes about it, when she Tweets about it or carries a mattress around on her back, calls the police or a rape crisis line, I believe her. The reason is [...]
I was a senior at Cornell University when I was arrested for heroin possession. As an addict — a condition that began during a deep depression — I was muddling my way through classes and doing many things I would come to regret, including selling [...]
As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children — sitting on my grandparents’ back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the [...]
WE MUST BE THE NEW GUARDS: OPEN LETTER TO WHITE POETS "But when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw [...]
I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the [...]
