What kind of weight? Love poems to Black women imprisoned in America.
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.
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