“Fly,” a short story that I’ve been nurturing for some time now, has been published in the Winter 2017 edition of Sixfold Journal. These Bronx girls remind me so much of the girls I grew up with. They are, in a lot of ways, those girls. This is how it begins: Everything in the world […]
Joshunda Sanders
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Trigger warning for the trauma of homelessness and mental illness This beautiful New York Times profile of Nakesha Williams, a Williams College graduate who died homeless on the street at the age of 46, was the first thing I read yesterday. My friend Amy sent it to me, saying it reminded her of the story […]
I haven’t been blogging that regularly since the holidays because I’ve been working on some longer form essays and works in progress, along with working on work work and doing other things. But I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on the 50th anniversary of The Kerner Report and its meaning for […]
Roses for the living. I was thinking of this saying when I first heard that Erica Garner had a heart attack and we were all hopeful for recovery. I was surrounded by my family, and my sweet nephew led us in prayer for her, and my thoughts were consumed with her and her family, what […]
“won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life? I had no model Born in Babylon Both nonwhite and woman What did I see to be except myself? I made it up Here on this bridge between starshine and clay, My one hand holding tight My other hand; come celebrate […]
Dear Mom: It has been five years since we said goodbye, that word you hate, the one that still gets stuck in my throat. There are days when it feels like it was last week and days when it feels like a decade has gone by. This is, usually, a season of joy and reclamation, […]
Winter is one of my favorite seasons, and I really want to like Christmas, but it’s complicated by the fact that my mother died during this season five years ago. Even before she fell ill with terminal cervical cancer, the holidays have always been challenging, and I’ve never been particularly good at knowing how to […]
In 2004, when She Hate Me came out, I was assigned to write a story about Spike Lee for the San Francisco Chronicle, where I was a young features reporter at the time. The movie’s tagline was: “One heterosexual male. 18 lesbians. His fee…$10,000 each.” Like a lot of Spike Lee’s work, I thought the […]
Three years before he would take his life, my father reached out to me by email, which was his preferred method of communication. He had not been in touch for years, despite my selfish calls and letters or pleas for him to send books I’d left behind at his place after a failed attempt at […]
1. It is almost Throwback Thursday again. I look down at my cracked iPhone that I feel too busy and too lazy to get fixed. I look at photos from this weekend when I was trying to forget The Thing That Made Me Want To Cry and I think I don’t want to share a […]
