"Deliberately writing against archival erasure and death driven logics of anti-Blackness, this volume chronicles Black women's aliveness, ethics of care, and rituals of healing. Nineteen contributors from interdisciplinary fields and diverse backgrounds explore Black feminine community, consciousness, ethics of care, spirituality, and social critique. They situate Black women's multidimensional experiences with COVID-19 and other violences that affect their lives. The stories they tell are connected and interwoven, bound together by anti-Black gendered COVID necropolitics and commitments to creating new spaces for breathing, healing and wellness"--

Rooted in the ways Black women understand their lives, this collection archives practices of healing, mothering, and advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognizing that Black women have been living in pandemics as far back as colonialism and enslavement, this volume acknowledges that records of the past—from the 1918 flu pandemic to the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—often erase the existence and experiences of Black women as a whole. Writing against this archival erasure, this collection consciously recenters the real-time experiences and perspectives of care, policy concerns, grief, and joy of Black women throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Nineteen contributors from interdisciplinary fields and diverse backgrounds explore Black feminine community, consciousness, ethics of care, spirituality, and social critique. They situate Black women’s multidimensional experiences with COVID-19 and other violences that affect their lives. The stories they tell are connected and interwoven, bound together by anti-Black gendered COVID necropolitics and commitments to creating new spaces for breathing, healing, and wellness. Ultimately, this time-warping analysis shows how Black women imagine a more just society, rapidly adapt to changing experiences, and innovate ethics of care even in the midst of physical distancing, which can be instructive for thinking of new ways of living both during and beyond the era of COVID-19. Contributors Shamara Wyllie Alhassan Sharnnia Artis Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards Candace S. Brown Jenny Douglas Kaja Dunn Onisha Etkins Rhonda M. Gonzales Endia Hayes Ashley E. Hollingshead Kendra Jason Julia S. Jordan-Zachery Stacie LeSure Janaka B. Lewis Michelle Meggs Nitya Mehrotra Sherine Andreine Powerful Marjorie Shavers Breauna Marie Spencer Tehia Starker Glass Amber Walker

This field of Black girls’ and women’s health (BGWH) science is both transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. As such, the contributors to this edited collection offer a unique lens to BGWH science, expanding our collective scientific worldviews. The contributing authors draw upon their ontological and epistemological knowledge to formulate pathways and inform methodologies for doing research and praxis to address BGWH. Each contributor draws upon these knowledges and offers the reader a way to better understand how their framing and writing can create change in the health of Black girls and women.

Lavender Fields uses autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. It centers their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes. Black women and girls in the United States are among the hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of illnesses, deaths, evictions, and increasing economic inequality. Riffing off Alice Walker’s telling of her search for Zora Neal Hurston, the authors of these essays and reflections offer raw tellings of Black girls’ and women’s experiences written in real time, as some of the contributors battled COVID-19 themselves. The essays center Black girls and women and their testimonies in hopes of moving them from the margin to the center. With a diversity of voices and ages, this volume taps into the Black feminine interior, that place where Audre Lorde tells us that feelings lie, to access knowledge—generational, past, and contemporary—to explore how Black women navigate COVID-19. Using womanism and spirituality, among other modalities, the authors explore deep feelings, advancing Black feminist theorizing on Black feminist praxis and methodology. In centering the stories of Black girls and women’s experiences with COVID-19, this work brings much-needed justice and equity to conversations about the pandemic. Just as Walker worked diligently to find Hurston, Lavender Fields attempts to “find” Black women amid all we are experiencing, ensuring visibility and attention. Contributors Tamaya Bailey reelaviolette botts-ward Kyrah K. Brown Brianna Y. Clark Kenyatta Dawson LeConté J. Dill Maryam O. Funmilayo Brandie Green Courtney Jackson Sara Jean-Francois Julia S. Jordan-Zachery Angela K. Lewis-Maddox Annet Matebwe Mbali Mazibuko Radscheda Nobles Nimot Ogunfemi J. Mercy Okaalet Chizoba Uzoamaka Okoroma Peace Ossom-Williamson Elizabeth Peart

Reflecting on the concept of frontera madre(hood) as both a methodological and theoretical framework, this collection embodies the challenges and resiliency of mothering along both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. More than thirty contributors examine how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies.

In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.

"Everyone seems to have an opinion about American black women--they need to get married, change their hair, act like 'ladies, ' and so on. Celebrated writer Tamara Winfrey Harris writes a searing account of being a black woman in America and explains why it's time for black women to speak for themselves"--Provided by publisher