This book uses letter writing as a form of engaging autoethnography to address relational histories and dynamics such as race, gender, loss, memory and resolution.It is structured around textual performances, poems, and dialogues in the form of letters. Set within the context of adult Black children and their Black mothers, each author uses their letters to reflect on life with and without mama, and their own sense of coming to know themselves in the absence of their mother. Each e...

The poems in this project were written within a 24‑hour period of each other and are presented in order of their appearance for the month of January 2024.Written as a call and response to each other, the poems are at times direct responses in content and form, or a mediation on what the offering triggered in the other. Using poetry writing as a methodological engagement with the reflective and reflexive attributes of autoethnography, this project offers an examination of lived expe...

Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet promotes the importance of intergenerational Black dialogue as a collaborative spirit-making across race, genders, sexualities, and cultures to bridge time and space.The authors enter this dialogue in a crisis moment: a crisis moment at the confluence of a pandemic, the national political transition of leadership in the United States, the necessary rise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activism—in the fac...

Collaborative Spirit-Writing and Performance in Everyday Black Lives is about the interconnectedness between collaboration, spirit, and writing. It is also about a dialogic engagement that draws upon shared lived experiences, hopes, and fears of two Black persons: male/female, straight/gay.This book is structured around a series of textual performances, poems, plays, dialogues, calls and responses, and mediations that serve as claim, ground, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, a...