#BlackWritersHistoryMonth
For #BlackHistoryMonth 2025—in this case, the month of February, as well as all of March, in part because February is the shortest month of the year, but also because I wasn't able to do it for most of February—I’m writing a post-a-day on the fediverse on Black writers that influenced me, including links to a short piece you can read in one sitting, and download links for at least one of their books.
I’m replicating these posts below as they appeared on my profile, and updating this page as the months unfold. All of the links should work, though some are not properly formatted yet, but will be by the end of this project.
Finally, this project was temporarily on hold as of February 9 but returned on March 1 and will continue throughout March.
february 2: Octavia E. Butler
for today, february 2, i'm celebrating Octavia E. Butler, a writer of speculative fiction whose name i see more of each year, as we enter the time periods she wrote of, and discover that our reality parallels the narratives she created in her novels, especially those of the duology of Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
Butler grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Pasadena, California, at a time when the area was dramatically more segregated than it is today (and it still very much is). she navigated dyslexia early on, and later got her AA in History from Pasadena City College. she often speaks in interviews of a pivotal experience that put her on her path toward writing:
The movie was called Devil Girl from Mars, and I saw it when I was about 12 years old, and it changed my life.... I had a series of revelations. The first was that 'Geez, I can write a better story than that.' And then I thought, 'Gee, anybody can write a better story than that.' And my third thought was the clincher: 'Somebody got paid for writing that awful story.' So I was off and writing, and a year later I was busy submitting terrible pieces of fiction to innocent magazines.
Butler kept copious journals in which she manifested a writerly life for herself, and much of what she wrote in them (all of which is available by appointment to explore at the Huntington Library in Pasadena; many excerpts available online) came true. she was the first science-fiction writer to receive the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and though none of her books were “bestsellers” in her lifetime, after renewed interest in her work throughout this century, in 2020, Parable of the Sower hit the bestseller list for the first time.
her books explore race, history, alienation, segregation and hierarchy, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality, and much more. Kindred (1979), the tale of a Black woman writer in the 1970s (much like Butler) who is spontaneously thrust back in time to the early 1800s whenever her white, slave-owning ancestor's life needs saving, is still probably the best novel i've ever read, even as it is deeply disturbing and as much horror as sci-fi.
below, i've linked to what i believe is one of the last short stories she wrote, “The Book of Martha,” in which a Black woman writer (much like Butler) confronts an ever-changing manifestation of God with questions about life and purpose. it reveals a writer wrestling with extremely difficult questions about the role of creative work, and is a story i return to often.
download PDF of Kindred (1979)
february 3: Stuart Hall
for today, february 3, i'm celebrating Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-British writer of academic works focusing on cultural analysis, sociology, race, power, colonialism, semiotics, representation, Marxist thought, and many other topics, and whose work i believe is more important today than ever in our increasingly media-saturated world. (also today is his birthday!)
we usually think of the ability to understand the many (and subtextual) meanings of the media we consume as “media literacy.” as a young person learning to be media literate, i'd begun to wonder why so much of the media i'd been exposed to was (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) pro-imperial, pro-capitalist, white supremacist, cisheterosexist, ableist, etc., etc. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)—edited by Hall and including a chapter by him called “The Work of Representation”—was the first book that gave me the answers i'd been looking for.
much of what you'll find it might seem obvious today: that there is a language of symbols, signs, and images that can be wielded in order to represent ideas, objects, or peoples, in ways that may or may not be accurate, and in ways that are necessarily structured by power. but to a young me, this was groundbreaking, and gave me the language i needed to challenge these expressions of (racist, capitalist, colonial, imperialist) power and thus better understand the world around me.
Hall's work in this area (semiotics) is only the tip of the iceberg of his vast and sprawling oeuvre, but it's the part i'm most familiar with, so below i'm linking to the “The Work of Representation” chapter from Representation, as well as 45-minute video lecture by Hall (along with transcript) that gives a broad overview of his approach.
watch “Representation and the Media”
download transcript of “Representation and the Media”
download PDF of “The Work of Representation”
february 4: June Jordan
for february 4, i'm celebrating June Jordan, a poet, writer, teacher, and all-around real one who lived her values as loudly as possible. a bisexual woman who dropped out of college after being asked to read not a single Black author, nor woman author, she is often thought of as an activist, though i would say the word does not do justice to her impact and legacy.
as has made the rounds online lately, Jordan was an outspoken champion of Palestinian liberation throughout her life, and was openly willing to confront amerikkkan imperialism and its genocidal proxy, israel, in her work. the famous line from “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” goes:
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family
i do think these lines are best read in context, and of course, this was only one of many of her poems on this topic. her staunch anti-zionism predictably limited her professional success, in ways recently charted—and contrasted against the trajectory of fellow writer Audre Lorde—in this long essay about the correspondence between them.
it's obvious in her work how much love she had and attention she gave to the Black people around her, even (or especially) those who didn't necessarily share Jordan's interests; “A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters” catches the speaker of the poem twirling difficult questions in their mind about the nature of genius, in the context of albert einstein and his supposedly endearing quirks, then unloads some of this onto an unsuspecting neighbor whose concerns are somewhere else entirely and whose stance on the matter ends up being as (or more) pithy and honest than Jordan's.
my favorite of her works, however, is a long piece titled “Poem about My Rights,” which i listened to her read for the first time last year via the audio recording available at the link below. it's a sprawling, kitchen-sink of a poem that seems to draw all of history (Jordan's and the world's) into itself, and more than that, it taught me how meaningful it can be to hear a poet read their work aloud, and has moved me to take the way in which i read my work aloud more seriously.
download PDF of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2012) [16 MB]
download PDF of her memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000) [11 MB]
february 5: Tongo Eisen-Martin
for today, february 5, i'm celebrating Tongo Eisen-Martin, who describes himself as “an absolute product of every nook and cranny of San Francisco.” thus, it should be no surprise that he's currently the city's poet laureate. he's also an educator, known for creating the “We Charge Genocide Again!” curriculum (downloadable link at bottom) while teaching at Columbia, based on his mother Arlene Eisen's report on the police/state violence against/murder of Black Americans.
i wrote yesterday about how hearing June Jordan read her work aloud taught me about the critical role of the auditory in poetry; in my opinion, Tongo Eisen-Martin embodies this and then some. some describe his work as jazzy; to me his work really epitomizes “rhythm.” every single one of his lines is sharp, heavy, intimate, gripping, and often darkly comical, brilliantly insightful, or just plain surprising—or all three at the same time. he also does this wonderful thing with what i think of as mini-anaphoras: just two or three lines that start with the same word or clause, to wonderful, powerful effect.
i had the great pleasure of hearing him read through a livestream of Beyond Baroque's Southern California Poetry Festival (starts at 42:34), and what stunned me was that he didn't just read one or a handful of poems; he performed a mashup of what must have been a dozen different poems, collaging excerpts together into a 15-minute tour de force of explosive lines of inimitable profundity (and all while holding a baby in one hand lol).
because of this, it's hard for me to point to one favorite poem; i could isolate any one of his lines and spend as much time with it as i might spend with a single poem by another writer. i'd definitely recommend Blood on the Fog (2021), his entry into the legendary Pocket Poets series from City Lights Books; the final lines from “A Good Earth,” the first poem in the collection, comprise a mantra i return to over and over:
It's a simple matter this revolution thing To really lie to no one To keep nothing godlike
To write a poem for God
read that over and over again, in or out of the context of the rest of the poem (linked below). if poetry can be used to discover truths beyond the reach of other forms or mediums, i don't think there's anything more truthful in this world than those four lines.
listen to “M'ap Pale / A Good Earth (feat. Tongo Eisen-Martin)” by Zeke Nealy
read “A Good Earth” [note: it's spaced differently here than it is in Blood on the Fog]
download PDF of Blood on the Fog [1.1 MB]
download PDF of “We Charge Genocide Again!” [5.5 MB]
february 6: Saidiya Hartman
for today, february 6, i'm celebrating Saidiya Hartman, a Black woman writer and academic who grew up in New York, and, like Tongo Eisen-Martin, attended and teaches at Columbia University, and, like Octavia E. Butler, is also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. but what i love about her work most may be that it betrays none of these things.
Hartman twists and breaks the academic mode/register so elegantly, it's easy to forget (and i think it's intended to be this way) that she is a product of the ivory tower and technically works from inside it. there are many other academics who bring influences from outside academia into their work, but to me, Hartman's work stands apart: it is diligent, rigorous, critical; raw, vulnerable, confessional; inventive, speculative, novelistic; never self-serving; somehow also anarchistic; demanding as hell; and, as far as i know, still inimitable.
i just started reading Scenes of Subjection (1997), where she confronts the limitations of the tools we (the West, academia) have at our disposal for understanding and historicizing slavery; and i had the brief pleasure of quasi-auditing some lectures on Lose Your Mother (2007), a memoiristic exploration of her family history—or lack thereof (her work often revolves around this gap between the violences and erasures that shape what can and cannot be known about the past).
but it's “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), a coda to Lose Your Mother in which she tries and intentionally fails to tie up a loose end from the book, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) that exemplify the power of her approach (though her work constantly and beautifully builds on itself). the former work explores a Black female figure called “Venus,” omnipresent in the archives of slavery, and yet who turns out to be wholly unknowable, revealing the problem at the heart of archival work: whose archives are these really? (short answer: white people's.)
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments picks up on this question with another kind of answer: here is the speculative archive that she can and dares to create, from a deeply engaged counter-reading of archival materials about Black women and girls whose supposed errantry, Hartman shows, was a gesture towards liberation, and she peppers in critical reflections on her own role as archivist/academic/witness to both tender and explosive effect. in short, Hartman's work is potentially life-changing for those seeking a methodology for understanding the past that is attentive to one's present and insistent on a liberatory future.
download PDF of “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) [706 KB]
download PDF of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) [33 MB]
february 7: Fred Moten
for february 7, i'm celebrating Fred Moten, another academic and writer. born and raised in Las Vegas, Moten attended Harvard intending to study economics, but was suspended for a year after failing academically (he was apparently more focused on reading Chomsky and living his politics), during which time he worked as a janitor and read and wrote poetry, then returned to Harvard, where he met his future collaborator Stefano Harney—and the rest is history.
like so many of the writers in this series, Moten crosses genre lines with aplomb. he's as prolific a poet as he is a scholar, and like Hartman and Octavia E. Butler, he's also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” award, though i think that, of the three, he might be most critical of the award's status and purpose.
i say this because of how i read The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a lyrical treatise/manifesto co-written with Harney on a variety of topics, though the parts i remember best are about the corporatization of academia, the politics that facilitate this, and, most importantly, the reason the state is so deeply invested in it: the lure and vortex of academia may be the state's most successful strategy for defanging radicals and rebels and reconstituting them into something of a counterrevolutionary class of bureaucrats (i am very loosely paraphrasing lol).
beyond critique, however, Moten and Harney encourage the reader to—if they have or want to—attend anyways, but to, in the process, forge and foster an underground (the titular “undercommons”) diametrically opposed to the ivory tower—what it represents and produces—and to live in this underground, use it to rob academia of what it's worth, and redistribute that hoarded wealth of knowledge freely. it should be no surprise, then, that The Undercommons was immediately released for free upon publication.
but maybe none of this speaks to these ideas as well as Moten's poetry does, and so i leave off with this excerpt from “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally”:
2.
and tear shit up. always a pleasure the banned deep brown of faces in the otherwise whack. the cruel disposed won’t stand
still. apparatus tear shit up and
always. you see they can’t get off when
they get off. some stateless folks spurn the pleasure they are driven
to be and strive against. man, hit me again.
read “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally”
download PDF of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) [1.4 MB]
february 8: Lucille Clifton
for february 8, i'm celebrating Lucille Clifton, a poet and educator born and raised in New York, who lived out the end of her life in Baltimore, having been poet laureate of Maryland for six years in the early 1980s. she was also born with a genetic mutation that ran in her family called polydactyly, giving her an extra finger on each hand that were surgically removed during her childhood. i bring this up because of how this kind of absence—or, as i think she conceived of it, the ghostly presence of what seems absent—influenced her work.
i hesitate to call her poetry humble or straightforward even though it can appear that way in comparison to the showy or dense work of others, but she is simply not a kitchen-sink poet: her lines (often two or three words) and stanzas tend towards the short-and-sweet, and her poems (of which there are bajillions) are focused and are already spiraling to a close from the first line. (i deeply admire this, as someone who tends to bloviate, lol.)
whether it's because i'm not familiar enough with her ouevre or because she comes at politics slant, what i've read of her work feels to me intimate and personal—still political, but the politics of a loving correspondence rather than of a stirring speech or manifesto. “wishes for sons” indicts patriarchal masculinities by casting a spell of pain at those who perpetuate them; “sisters” cherishes the shared Black womanhood of Clifton and her sister and ends with the killer lines, “only where you sing / i poet.”; and “my dream about being white” pithily, elegantly rejects the idea of assimilation:
and i’m wearing white history but there’s no future in those clothes
the other part of her work i'm interested in wasn't really celebrated in her time, or else remains unpublished, according to this article about Clifton's spirit writing. Clifton was a “two-headed woman”—someone with access to another plane of existence, specifically that of ghosts, spirits, and the dead (hence the reference at the start to ghostly presences/absences). she, like me, relished automatic writing, and used it to tap into her past selves, to understand her corporeality not as fixed in her body, its color, its shape, its racialization, its gendering, but rather simply as one incarnation of many, inextricably entangled across space-time. a relevant excerpt from the article:
the once and future dead who learn they will be white men weep for their history. we call it rain.
download PDF of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965 – 2010 (2012) [13.2 MB]
march 1: Starr Davis
for march 1, i'm celebrating Starr Davis, an incredible Black woman poet, essayist, and all-star mother from whom i had the great honor of learning from last year in a workshop called “Poetry and Legalism.” what immediately stunned me about Starr was her brilliant pedagogy, which i only began to process as i sat down to work on our first assignment. i realized that, in our first class, she'd beautifully and unshowingly modeled a frank honesty and vulnerability that i'd never seen someone in the role of a teacher do so in such an unflinching way — and among new students, and, thus, relative strangers. it was only because of this that i was able to be as honest and vulnerable myself in the first piece i wrote, the first of a slew of poems written in her workshop that represent the best of what i can do.
the class was called “Poetry and Legalism” in part because we happened to study the intersection of the two subjects, which is sizable and fascinating. but it was also named for the margin at which Starr has lived much of her life. Starr is one of the inaugural Haymarket Books Writing Freedom Fellows, which “recognizes and elevates the vital artistic and cultural contributions of system-impacted poets and writers,” and her work consistently engages critically with the so-called criminal justice system, and the ways in which it is one of the many roots of the oppression she faces as a mother, a partner, a Black woman, and a survivor.
i consider her a kindred spirit as a writer because of how much she embraces hybridity: the first piece i ever read (and heard) of hers was “Hoarder,” the simplicity of which — it is what i call a “list poem” that resembles something like a collage — only strengthens its accumulatory power. it begins:
I collect broken BiblesThe pages hang off the bindingThose religious pamphletsFrom pushy pastorsBroken pieces of English onBroken pieces of paperNewspaper clippings of dead boysI had dead sex withI collect old blood
and only increases in intensity from there. meanwhile, “COUNTERPETITIONER’S SUPPORTING AFFIDAVIT” does one of my favorite things that a poem can do, which is “hermit crab” a dry, legal form in order to generate powerful, transcendent ideas and language:
- She was born in flight
- Our survival my breasts & these poems
- Current Occupation(s): not becoming my mother, manifesting a man that ain’t my father
Starr mentioned during our class that she is finding as welcome a home in essay as she has in poetry, and indeed, i am a huge fan of her Substack newsletter, Notes from a Writer Mama, where she regularly writes essays “on the family court system, [her] struggle to reclaim my daughter, and [her] ongoing journey of healing while navigating the complexities of parenting a child who has faced trauma.” subscribe and support her if you're able; she is an unignorable and inimitable writer whose work i will seek out for as long as there is work of hers to find.
her forthcoming debut collection of poetry, AFFADAVIT, will be published by Hanging Loose Press.
read “COUNTERPETITIONER’S SUPPORTING AFFIDAVIT”
read “Notes on Government Assistance & Motherhood”
march 7: Samuel R. Delany
for march 7, i'm celebrating Samuel R. Delany, a queer as hell, Black sci-fi and fantasy writer, as well as essayist and memoirist, who (and i know i say this about a lot of these writers) may have had the largest influence on me of all — if not on my writing, then on my life. he was born and raised in Harlem, where he was living and going to school when he published his first science fiction story, setting him on a lifelong path of writing. he and his partner, the poet Marilyn Hacker, promptly married and moved to the East Village; less than two years later, at age 20, he published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962).
he details much about the years that followed in his memoirs: Heavenly Breakfast (1979), The Motion of Light in Water (1988), and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999). i've only read pieces of the first two, but he is as adept at writing honestly and vividly — yet, in such a clear-eyed way — about his life as he is about the fantastical worlds of his fiction. i think this is because his work betrays no distinction between his approaches to the two; in a compilation of essays, lectures, and letters about writing — called, fittingly, About Writing (2005) — he writes about the art of storytelling in a way that doesn't differentiate between the skills needed to captivate an in-person audience with a lively life anecdote and those needed to captivate a reader.
this abolished border between life lived and lives imagined culminates in what is considered the first-ever literary work about HIV/AIDS, his novella-length hybrid piece titled “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” which appears in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), the second book in a series of collections of stories that take place in the fictional, titular Nevèrÿon. “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” however, moves back and forth in alternating sections between the land of Nevèrÿon, where a mysterious sexually transmitted illness is spreading among its queer/sex worker population, and the land of New York, where Delany moves among his fellow queer folks (some of whom are also sex workers) in the very early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic at a time when no one can even be certain exactly how it's transmitted. it's brutal, devastating, disturbing, brilliant, and a marvel to read.
that about describes all of Delany's work to me, or at least those to which i find myself returning over and over again. one of these is “Wagner/Artaud,” an essay from Longer Views (1996), one of his many essay collections on an impressively wide variety of topics, though usually somewhat literary in nature. it's the essay that inspired my own “Parables” essay, the first piece i wrote after transitioning, in which i attempt to do something like what Delany does with Wilhelm Richard Wagner and Antonin Artaud for Octavia E. Butler. essentially, he makes a convincing case that their oeuvres sit at the bivalve heart of Western art. i mostly skip the sections about Wagner when i re-read it; it's the parts of Artaud that reveal Delany's beautiful approach to writing, understanding it — as few others do — as a mechanism of apartheid that separates good writers from bad, the worthy from the unworthy, the published from the never-known. Artaud's lifelong desperation to express himself and have his work taken seriously (and, perhaps, for it to change the world) screams chillingly from behind Delany's words.
i've already waxed poetic about Delany for long enough, so i'll only note briefly two more of his works (he is prolific enough to write about for the length of this entire page). one is the mega-tome, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), which changed my life upon beginning to read it; it blends erotica that depicts every possible taboo sexual act, with a profound and touching lifelong love story between, in my opinion, two of the most memorable characters in fiction ever written. the other is a short story called “The Game of Time and Pain,” the last story chronologically in the Nevèrÿon series, which has Gorgik the Liberator, a character that recurs throughout the Nevèrÿon stories, reflecting on his life from middle age and musing on the strangeness of being the person most closely associated with abolishing slavery in his time and place. it includes what i consider the most beautiful phrase ever uttered in English:
...the self that want defined.
download Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985) [2 MB]
download Longer Views (1996) [21 MB]
download Return to Nevèrÿon (1987) [14 MB]