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Lyla June - Time Traveler (feat. Desirae Harp) 

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Lyla June - Time Traveler (feat. Desirae Harp) 

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Lyla June - Time Traveler (feat. Desirae Harp) Official Music Video

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When We Exhale is an anthology uplifting cultural memory and healing tools from Black women. We envision a society where Black women can exhale. Centering our breath work as sacred, we hope to build a legacy of awareness and expression.

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Janelle Monáe - Turntables [Emotion Picture]

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A finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award and 2020 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction.

Are you an educator looking to add this book to your syllabus? Take a look at our Teaching Companion here.

"Don't think for one minute that Black Imagination is easy. As you will read here, it is hard-earned and sometimes dangerous, but it's necessary, and radical, to claim and work towards. Listening to my people in this book gave me so much life, and I'm pretty sure, dear reader, you're in for the same." -from the Foreword by Steven Dunn

What is your origin story?
How do you heal yourself?
Imagine a world where you are loved, safe, and valued.

"Witnessing is sacred work too. Seeing ourselves as whole and healthy is an act of pure rebellion in a world so titillated by our constant subjugation," reflects viral curator Natasha Marin, on Black Imagination. This dynamic collection of Black voices works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are nowhere near monochromatic. "Craving nuance over stereotype, we sought out black children, black youth, LGBTQ+ black folks, unsheltered black folks, incarcerated black folks, neurodivergent black folks, as well as differently-abled black folks." Each insists on their own variance and challenges readers to witness for themselves that Black Lives (and Imaginations) Matter.

Cover art by Vanessa German.

To facilitate book club, classroom, and other group discussions around this book we're offering an additional discount on all orders of five or more copies. Use promocode "blackjoy" at checkout to apply.

Praise for Black Imagination

Recommended by Jason Reynolds on PBS NewsHour

" Black Imagination reads like a survival guide with a sense of humor as deep as its sense of history, a literary oasis for black people fed up with the white gaze."
-The Stranger

"Our bodies and actions are under external control, but the well-spring of rebellion is our own imagination. In Black Imagination, Natasha Marin shows us how to free our imagining-as a first step toward freeing ourselves."
- Gloria Steinem

" Black Imagination is somehow as innovatively utopic as it is sincerely soulful. I've never felt the physical feeling of pages melting in my hands or chapters folding themselves into squadrons of black airplanes flying to freedom because I've never experienced an art object like Black Imagination. It is exquisite art in action."
- Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

"Have you ever read a book and realized you're reading something you didn't know you needed? This is not a book to simply read in total and digest-yes, do that-but it is also a work to return to in parts whenever necessary. It's a book to ingest like medicine, because it is that. Lastly, it is a reminder that joy, too, is necessary and also a form of resistance."
- Rion Amilcar Scott, author The World Doesn't Require You

"In an age where spirituality has a price-tag and crystals, teas, and sage reign supreme, this book is a welcome rebuttal. Black Imagination shakes us out of our cultural trance and reminds us that so much of what we deem to be true is learned, and so much of what is actually true has to be remembered. With the storytelling talent of Grio tradition this book is required reading for the African diaspora."
- Akilah Hughes, author of Obviously: Stories from My Timeline and host of Crooked Media's What A Day

"If there is healing to be done it begins with a book like Black Imagination. It's time to return to our beauty, step by step, word by word."
- E. Ethelbert Miller, author of If God Invented Baseball

"Words create worlds. Black Imagination weaves lyrical narratives of being and becoming into a tapestry that shows us the beauty and power of unfettered imagination. From cosmic allegories on origin to piercing reckonings with race and family trauma, this book creates a doorway through which we can become reacquainted with our essential selves, and dream a whole new reality."
- Keisha-Gaye Anderson, author of Everything Is Necessary

"Weaponize[s] a conceptual work of art in the asymmetrical war that is race in America... the words penetrate the defenses and break your heart."
- Dr. Jon Woodson, author of Summer Games and The Esoteric Mission of Zora Neale Hurston

"Moving, nuanced, and realer than real, Black Imagination is a necessary archive for these times. This unique project asks Black people to respond to three simple yet profound questions about one's origin, self-healing rituals, and alternate world visions in which Black people feel safe and are valued. The rawness of these pages, along with a versatility of voice and vision makes for an immersive read that galvanizes the imagination and massages the heart."
- Samantha Thornhill author of A Card for My Father

"Authentic and empowered, wistful and insistent, the chorus of voices gathered in Black Imagination sings in defiance of patriarchal, heterosexist, white supremacist erasure. Drawing from the ether of pre-memory, the soulsoil of ancestral knowledge, and depths of individual and collective longing, this collection bears witness to the many ways Blackfolk have devised/unearthed to resist the chokeholds of violence on our subjectivity. A powerful testament to the richness and resilience of Black interiority, Black Imagination reminds each and every one of us of our truest story: 'Despite and beyond time, I am.'"
- Lauren K. Alleyne, author of Honeyfish

"The agenda of Black Imagination is defiantly hopeful, and rests on a simple, but deeply complicated tenet of faith-faith in the proposition that empathy and hope are all functions of the imagination, or even the products of the imagination. To read Black Imagination is to witness writers wrestling with the abstraction of language to achieve the tangible and bodily effects of safety in a hostile world. Think Soul Train Line, think The Stroll, think the joyous striving with language for the possibilities of safety and hope."
- Kwame Dawes, author of Nebraska

" Black Imagination reveals itself at times as a baptism, a confessional, a communion, and a coronation. This really isn't a book. It's more like a rosary or a mandala. Which is to say, this is a holy thing. Handle it with reverence. Read it out loud like a prayer."
- Mike Gaston, CUT CEO

"What happens when the Black imagination thrives, unburdened by the white gaze? This collection reaches across time and generations, cities and continents, identities and experiences, to answer: We fill the unburdened space with rituals, remembrances, and discoveries, with our joys and vulnerabilities. The contributors' poems, vignettes, and smaller morsels of language come together to form a chorus, their voices recurring in multiple passages throughout the collection, to powerful effect. Black Imagination is a freedom song, deep-throated and resonant. The collection also answers the age-old Black question-Where your people from?-and builds on it: Where do you go to heal? And there is healing in the pages of this collection, medicine in the lines."
- Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

"It's fitting that this project began on the backend of Marin's two reparations projects-the first for folks to reach out to each other; the second Marin's healing of herself-cause this here is a catalogue and a map. One of the riffs begins 'legend says that I was born in the back seat of a Cadillac,' and you know Avery Young is telling you all that's needed to know he survives. These pieces, together, are a kind of rent party, a reminder that Black folks can gather in a room and heal. 'Coping is ever so awkward,' as Natasha herself says-but damn if it ain't necessary. And damn if that coping itself, does turn into a beauty here, a Black imagination makes all of us better."
- Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Bastards of the Reagan Era

"I challenge us to read this tremendous and tremendously important book, white friends. I challenge us to read it without inserting ourselves into the narrative and without rushing to interpret experiences that are not our own (a hint: none of these are). I challenge us to read it without revving into some look-at-me-ish version of empathy which, at best, only ever demonstrates the weakest, most facile form of allyship. And then I challenge us to read it again. And again. 'We persist,' Natasha Marin writes. 'We have persisted. We will continue to persist with or without acknowledgement.' Black Imagination does not need our justification. But it demands our attention. And it's about damn time it gets it."
- Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Hausfrau

" Black Imagination required Natasha Marin to curate as a curate in the medieval sense-a spiritual guide that cares for souls. This assemblage-at once a book, an installation, a secret meeting, and a waiting room-dares to sing an aria in white and violet with Brooks. We are challenged to move beyond the abject, beyond pure pessimism, on the wings of a different criticality-to walk with Hayden, with Douglass 'visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.'"
- Christian Campbell, author of Running the Dusk

"Like a goooood gris-gris sack comes this book. I looked inside and among the medicines found some warm balsam, some astringent drams in brilliant vials, even powerful seeds that tumbled me up into deep interiors. What Natasha Marin has curated via this anthology-as-curative she herself needed, is a multifarious and vibrant sociality of Black care; thus, a network entangling giving a damn with only one left to give. That generosity is Black Imagination's principle ingredient pot-and-kettled into the poems, microessays, origin stories, spells, and rituals gathered for our collective dreaming and healing. How you feeling? That so? Black Imagination invites you to accept this good balm being given."
- Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies

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Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures

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A finalist for the 2021 Washington State Book Award and 2020 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction. Are you an educator looking to add this book to your syllabus? Take a look at our Teaching Companion here. "Don't think for one minute that Black Imagination is easy.

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\t͟hə\·\ˈā-nə\
A collection and celebration of humanity.
EST. 2020
Submissions Open: SEPTEMBER - NOVEMBER 2021

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Comedian, musician, and actor, Jamie Foxx will embark on a multi-city book tour to celebrate the release of his first memoir, ACT LIKE YOU GOT SOME SENSE (Grand Central Publishing- on sale October 19).

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Raina J. León, PhD is a Black and Afro-Boricua Philadelphian (living for many years in the Chochenyo Ohlone territory of Berkeley). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). Salmon Poetry also published sombra : (dis)locate. Her first chapbook, profeta without refuge was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Firecracker award. Her second chabbook, Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self, was published by Alley Cat Books (2019). Her poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work has been published in well over 100 journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary's College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there, and as a creative arts practitioner and co-learner, holding space in various communities.

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Raina J. León, PhD is a Black and Afro-Boricua Philadelphian (living for many years in the Chochenyo Ohlone territory of Berkeley). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and...

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Recordings of Black wisdom over Gilkey’s music

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A thoughtful series of original instrumental tracks blended to the powerful words of great Black activists. Meant to inspire, uplift and pay homage to great African-Americans. To learn more about these amazing African American artists and activists visit these links below:

Maya Angelou
JamesBaldwin
Nikki Giovanni
Harry Belafonte

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A thoughtful series of original instrumental tracks blended to the powerful words of great Black activists. Meant to inspire, uplift and pay homage to great African-Americans. To learn more about these amazing African American artists and activists visit these links below: Maya Angelou JamesBaldwin Nikki Giovanni Harry Belafonte

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Poseidon was easier than most.
He calls himself a god,
but he fell beneath my fingers
with more shaking than any mortal.
He wept when my robe fell from my shoulders.

I made him bend his back for me,
listened to his screams break like waves.
We defiled that temple the way it should be defiled,
screaming and bucking our way from corner to corner.
The bitch goddess probably got a real kick out of that.
I'm sure I'll be hearing from her.

She'll give me nightmares for a week or so;
that I can handle. Or she'll turn the water in my well into blood; I'll scream when I see it, and that will be that. Maybe my first child will be born with the head of a fish. I'm not even sure it was worth it, Poseidon pounding away at me, a madman, losing his immortal mind because of the way my copper skin swells in moonlight. Now my arms smoke and itch. Hard scales cover my wrists like armour. C'mon Athena, he was only another lay, and not a particularly good one at that, even though he can spit steam from his fingers. Won't touch him again. Promise. And we didn't mean to drop to our knees in your temple, but our bodies were so hot and misaligned. It's not every day a gal gets to sample a god, you know that. Why are you being so rough on me? I feel my eyes twisting, the lids crusting over and boiling, the pupils glowing red with heat. Athena, woman to woman, could you have resisted him? Would you have been able to wait for the proper place, the right moment, to jump those immortal bones? Now my feet are tangled with hair, my ears are gone. My back is curving and my lips have grown numb. My garden boy just shattered at my feet. Dammit, Athena, take away my father's gold. Send me away to live with lepers. Give me a pimple or two. But my face. To have men never again be able to gaze at my face, growing stupid in anticipation of that first touch, how can any woman live like that? How will I be able to watch their warm bodies turn to rock when their only sin was desiring me? All they want is to see me sweat. They only want to touch my face and run their fingers through my . . . my hair is it moving?

My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins
of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield
and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap
of it. Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat
and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama,
repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue
until it sounded like an instruction to God, not a name.
She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees,
a trip-up in the doubledutch swing, a starched pinafore
and peppermint-in-the-sour-pickle kinda child, stiff-laced
and unshakably fixed on salvation.Her Patricia Ann would never idly throat the Lord's name or wear one of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees. She'd be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone, jobs requiring alarm-clock discipline and sensible shoes. My four downbeats were music enough for a vapid life of butcher-shop sawdust and fatback as cuisine, for Raid spritzed into the writhing pockets of a Murphy bed. No crinkled consonants or muted hiss would summon me. My daddy detested borders. One look at my mother's watery belly, and he insisted, as much as he could insist with her, on the name Jimi Savannah, seeking to bless me with the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All-Stars. He wanted to shoot muscle through whatever I was called, arm each syllable with tiny weaponry so no one would mistake me for anything other than a tricky whisperer with a switchblade in my shoe. I was bound to be all legs, a bladed debutante hooked on Lucky Strikes and sugar. When I sent up prayers, God's boy would giggle and consider. Daddy didn't want me to be anybody's surefire factory, nobody's callback or seized rhythm, so he conjured a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it. And yes, he was prepared for the look my mother gave him when he first mouthed his choice, the look that said,That's it, you done lost your goddamned mind. She did that thing she does where she grows two full inches with righteous, and he decided to just whisperLove you, Jimi Savannah whenever we were alone, re- and rechristening me the seed of Otis, conjuring his own religion and naming it me.

and spy whole lifetimes on the undersides of leaves.
Jazz intrudes, stank clogging that neat procession
of lush and flutter. His eyes, siphoned and dimming,
demand that he accept ardor as it is presented, with
its tear-splashed borders and stilted lists, romance
that is only on the agenda because hours do not stop.
Bless his sliver of soul. He's nabbed a sizzling matron
who grays as we watch, a thick-ankled New England
whoop, muscled to suffer his stifling missionary weight.
Earth-smudged behind the wheel of her pickup,
she hums a tune that rhymes dots of dinner trapped
in his beard with twilight. Is it still a collision course
if you must lie down to rest? Bless her as she tries
on his name for size and plucks hairs from her chin.
Bless him as he barrels toward yet another wife
who will someday realize, idly, that her only purpose
in this dwindling novella of his days is to someday
lower his heralded bulk, with little fanfare, into a grave.

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Poseidon was easier than most. He calls himself a god, but he fell beneath my fingers with more shaking than any mortal. He wept when my robe fell from my shoulders. I made him bend his back for me, listened to his screams break like waves.

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Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.

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Gerald Horne is Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and has published three dozen books including, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA and Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empir…

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Our Ancestors Were 'Bout It: The Maroons & Black Liberation In North America | The Breakdown

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Our Story

Dave Kapell, founder of Magnetic Poetry, was suffering from writer's block while trying to compose song lyrics. To overcome this problem, he wrote down interesting words on pieces of paper and rearranged them, looking for inspiration. What he hadn't figured into this experiment was his allergies. One good sneeze and any progress was sent flying across the room. Dave decided to glue the words to pieces of magnets and stick them to a pizza tin. Then he got hungry and the now magnetized words made their way to the refrigerator door. Before too long, Dave wasn't the only one rearranging his would-be song lyrics. When friends came over, Dave noticed they started to move the magnets around, amusing themselves by writing the first magnetic poems.

After seeing his friends having fun, Dave thought he might be able to sell his word kits at a local craft fair. He made up 100 kits and set up shop at Calhoun Square, a mall in the Uptown area of Minneapolis. All 100 kits were gone after 3 hours. That night, he recruited as many friends as pizza and beer could draw and made up more kits--all of which sold as rapidly the next day.

From these beginnings, Magnetic Poetry® has now sold over three million word kits, over one billion word tiles--growing from the Original Kit to a kid's line of kits, to foreign language kits, to over 100 Themed kits.

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Create poems with our classic Magnetic Poetry online game! Or create poems with our new Magnetic Poetry online game!

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Your reflections help support funding for this workshop. Please fill out this form by the end of this workshop

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Raise Your Voice is a free monthly workshop exploring connection, healing, and empowerment through creative writing and expression. The goal is to illuminate stories of Black writers in the Bay Area and the dynamic power of writing. Authentically presenting our communities with additional tools to r…

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Janae Newsom
https://janaenewsom.com/