If you are in the neighborhood, then you might have heard the thunder roar like I did…✨

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“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” - Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

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Black in Blues will be released on the 65th anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s transition. I’m praying that it honors the ancestors and that its (inevitable) flaws won’t prevent it from being a conduit for their witness and wisdom.

don’t mind us / if you see us / telling about the departed / for months, and years to come — eulogies outta linger / like the fragrance of / an everlasting perfume

nikki giovanni

we are so grateful

rest now ✨

“Holidays seem to lose their savor as you get older. It’s like a passage of a kind — from one palate to another.”

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“Hope is no substitute for strategy.” - Percival Everett
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“Artificial intelligence is no substitute for the real thing.” - Percival Everett
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Narratives that treat Alabama (the land I love) as something more than a historical footnote, a Southern caricature, or a trope-riddle slang will always have my heart. This story is full of Afrofuturistic possibility, Black gumption, and blues. All kinds of blues. Thank you, Cebo!

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“We live in a country that has a sadistic obsession with self-destruction.”

“Sadistic?”

“Sadistic, fam…sadistic.”

Afterwhile, wonder becomes like a nag. It develops a beat. Soon it becomes a heart. And you realize that the only way you will survive this thing - this life - is by doing the thing that keeps you alive.

Tending to my literary imagination is - and will always be - about a kind of aliveness.

“Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” - Howard Thurman, mystic, preacher, author, teacher

He looked out into the morning, inhaled the day, and said, “Let us begin.”

…