What kind of weight? Love poems to Black women imprisoned in America.
Feb 9 2019
Part of the story of this book came from making the decision that I'm not going to kill myself, and that I do not want to live a depressed life from now until this sentiment becomes less popular in American culture. But what I do need to learn to do is to negotiate power and humanity under these circumstances. And the people that I knew who knew how to do that were Black women that had experienced similar things, or more intense oppression historically.
Writer DaMaris Hill traces a history, and present, of Black women imprisoned in America - under a parallel regime of sexual violence and exploitation in the Jim Crow era and beyond, subject to the edges of a legal and economic system built on repression, risking freedom and safety in the simple acts of navigating daily life in a racist country.
DaMaris is author of the book A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland from Bloomsbury.
Guest
DaMaris B. Hill
DaMaris B. Hill is a writer, scholar and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Related Interviews
