Jennifer C. Nash, "How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory" (Duke UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Kendall Deneen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Jennifer C. Nash about her new book, How We Write Now, Living with Black Feminist Theory, out last June from Duke University Press. How We Write Now illuminates the ways that contemporary Black feminists use beautiful writing to stay close to and live with Black loss.

The particular forms of Black loss that this book is interested in are quotidian, slow, or ongoing, and may go unrecognized as Black loss altogether, which means that How We Write Now unsettles dominant conceptions of Black loss as anticipated but fast and often spectacular. The book invites readers to see how Black feminist writing grapples with ordinary Black loss, offering not escape but proximity, tenderness, and even beauty. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me.

So to get us started, can you talk a little bit about the origins of this project? Sure. So I think the project started in a few different ways. I was writing what seemed to be two different books. I was writing a book that was about the voice of contemporary Black feminist theory, and I was writing a book about

my mother, which was really something that like I didn't imagine would have a life outside of my computer. It was just like something I was doing. And I came to realize through writing groups and conversations with friends that these two seemingly different projects actually shared the same singular preoccupation with loss and that there might be a way to weave them together, which at first made me pretty uncomfortable because I don't ordinarily do personal writing. And so that felt like a kind of a risk.

that I wasn't sure I was willing to take. So that's sort of like one origin story of the book. And I think the other origin story of the book happened when I was teaching at Northwestern in Black Studies. And it was right around the time that In the Wake came out, Christina Sharp's book.

And I always joke with students that I'm like, in the way it came out and then Black Studies was forever changed. But there was this sense, my students were reading it and they were really transformed by it. And I remember one of my students said in one of those lines that was like totally a throwaway line, but really stuck with me. She said, is this how we can write now? Like this, we can do this. But I was like, oh, that's so interesting. Like, and that phrase really stuck with me and made me want to think about

what it was that Sharpe's book inaugurated in Black Studies, what kind of voice it inaugurated, and how it transformed the field, because I think it really has in the almost decade since it came out. So those are kind of like the dual origin stories of the book. Since this is obviously such an important piece of the book, I was wondering if you could talk about how you define beautiful writing and why contemporary Black feminists are using beautiful writing. Yeah, so...

For the first part, how to define beautiful writing, I'm really interested in writing that cultivates a voice that seeks proximity between author and reader and between author and the objects that that author studies. I'm interested in a voice that's

That's intimate. I think at some point in the book, I say this is writing that whispers in its reader's ear, that seeks to move us, that withholds nothing from us, that is preoccupied with the detail, the intricacy, that it almost seeks excess in its attention to detail, and particularly in detail of the ordinary and the quotidian.

I think it's writing that's literary in its voice. And I think since writing the book, one of the things I realized I'm trying to track is a real shift in a kind of Black feminist preoccupation from the kind of social science

orientation of say the 80s and early 90s when black feminism was really interested in thinking about say the juridical to the kind of literary voice that I think has become prevalent in our in our field right now and so I guess I'm interested in a voice that's that's really poetic in a fundamental way so that's that's how I sort of want to think about beauty and

And the second question was, why do I think black feminists use beautiful writing now? I think there's kind of there's there's two answers to that. I mean, I think one answer is I think black feminism has always been interested in voice. And I think

the Black feminist theoretical project has always been a project about experimentation. And so there are clearly these antecedents to the voice that I'm interested in, like thinking about Pat Williams and alchemy of race and rights or the voice that's cultivated amongst so many of the contributors of this bridge called My Back. But I think what I'm trying to trace is a moment where we Black feminists have transformed what constitutes a theoretical voice

So that a theoretical voice is now an intimate voice. And in the book, I'm trying to think about how so much of the cultivation of this intimate voice unfolded during Black Lives Matter. And as I often say, when I talk about the book now, I was writing in a moment that was a Black Lives Matter moment. And we are so clearly in a post Black Lives Matter moment. So it's interesting to think about how much has shifted in a short period of time. But I think for many of the writers that I'm interested in,

an intimate voice is a way of, is seen as perhaps the only way of recording loss and how it undoes and reassembles Black life. I think, and we can think about that as a real shift again from like an 80s, early 90s Black feminist strategy that was about quantifiability, aggregation, right? Like this is the ways that Black violence affects Black folks and like data assembly and things like this is not that. This is like, I'm going to write

from the most intimate part of myself, right? It's a very different kind of recording of what loss looks like. And so, yeah, I think it is a voice that took off as a strategy during Black Lives Matter. And I think it's a voice that the market has celebrated.

in ways that are both interesting and troubling. I think it's a voice that has almost become an expectation, I think, at least from publishing that Black feminist right in an intimate voice, that it's become kind of the norm. And so that's the complicated piece, right? There's always this interface between Black feminism, especially now, and the market that's messy. But I think, yeah, something about Black Lives Matter has remade the ways that Black feminists want to speak about loss.

Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between Black maternal subjectivity and loss? Sure. I think some of this, it's funny, people often ask, oh, how is your work connected? How are your books connected? And I'm like, retrospectively, I guess I could tell you something, but as you're writing something, you're just in your preoccupations. So my previous book, Birthing Black Mothers, was really interested in thinking about the relationship between Black motherhood and loss and thinking about how

Black maternal political subjectivity in the US is constituted through loss that loss becomes a platform through which that black motherhood becomes a platform through which black loss is legible. And so I was, again, thinking about this Black Lives Matter moment and folks like Sabrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother, who becomes legible as a political subject through the murder of her son, and who will even narrate herself that way, who will say,

I was not a political person until my son was murdered and it was his murder that made me into a political subject. And that's a kind of authorized narrative, right? In US public life is like, there is tragedy, there is grief. It authorizes a kind of righteous political subjectivity. I think in the book that I'm writing about, the book that we're talking about today, so much of the contemporary Black feminist writing about loss is written through mothers, broadly defined. Sometimes it's about

So I'm thinking about Christina Sharp, particularly in her more recent book, Ordinary Notes, which she at the very end of the book says is a love letter to her mother. So much of that book is thinking about Black loss and Black living through the figure of her mother and through her relationship with her mother. She also develops this idea of beauty as a method for Black life through her mother.

Someone like Elizabeth Alexander, who I read about her memoir, Light of the World, which is about the sudden and unexpected death of her husband. Much of her understanding of what that loss is comes through the frame of being a Black mother. So I think that there is this way in which motherhood and the relationship between, particularly in the context of my work, mothers and daughters, shapes so much of how Black feminists think about loss. But I also think that Black feminists are thinking about

mothers broadly, metaphorically, thinking about the loss of mother lands, what it means to lose where you've come from, broadly defined, what it means to lose mother tongue, thinking about just the variety of ways that Black feminists have thought about losing something that's thought of as fundamental or fundamental to who we are and returning to it. And of course, like I said earlier, this is an enduring theme in Black feminist work, like Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens as a kind of

fundamental way of thinking about doing black feminist work as recovering our mothers and foremothers, whether for Walker, her biological mother's gardens, or for literary foremothers, or Neil Hurston, that they're both her mothers. So I think part of what started the book for me was a desire to think about how much mothers continue to still matter for how black feminism engages in its theoretical work.

So in chapter two, which is titled Staying at the Bone, you turn to Black feminist writing about their own familial losses. And I was wondering if you could tell the listeners a little bit about what you mean by sort of staying at the bone of these losses. Yeah. So staying at the bone is a phrase that Elizabeth Alexander uses in an interview that she did with Sheryl Sandberg. Both Sandberg and Alexander had lost their partners unexpectedly. And they did this conversation in the New York Times about grief.

And one of the things that Alexander says that's always really stuck with me from that interview is that in the process of writing the book, Light of the World, she felt like she was staying close to her husband. And she was very afraid when she finished writing the book that that closeness would be broken, that there was something about returning to the work that allowed her to return to him.

And she has this moment where she says how important it is to, quote, stay at the bone of what is true. And so for Alexander, and what I take that to mean, so much of how she's writing about loss is about inattention to its finest detail, right?

And I think it's complicated and I'll come back to that in a second. But I think part of what she wants to do is to think about, for example, she has a scene where she's in the hospital after her husband has been pronounced dead and she goes to look at his body one last time. And what she gives the readers in that chapter is this extended, highly detailed meditation on what his body looked like, what it meant. And she talks about actually climbing on top of him one last time and covering his body with her body. And for her, it's like that attention to...

every fleshy detail of his body is a way of staying true to the loss. When I said it's complicated, I think there are moments, there's a lovely complicated aside in Elizabeth Alexander's memoir where she says something like, every partnership has its challenges. We had ours, but we always found our way through them. And I'm always like, girl, I don't know about those challenges. So there is this way in which Light of the World is a romance. And she says at the very beginning, it is a love story. And it's, I think,

Those are the ways in which she's both staying at the bone and maybe glossing some things that feel like she doesn't, maybe they're too private. Maybe she feels like they're not worth exposing. I'm not sure. Right. But it is, she is invested in the frame of the love story. But even within that frame, I think when I, when I talk about staying at the bone, it's that deep attention to seemingly quotidian detail that I think she wants to argue allows her to stay close to loss and to do it justice. Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about how you read Jesmyn Ward's writing about the difference between witnessing and spectating? Oh, sorry. Can I talk about it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot to say about witnessing, um,

So I think one way to think about that difference, and I'm to think with a slightly different archive, there was an interview Imani Perry conducted with Tamir Rice's mother. And one of the things Tamir Rice's mother said, and this was an article that was called Stop Hustling Black Death. One of the things she said was, my son's name has been used so much and the discussion of his murder has come up so much that even in death, he's not mine anymore. Like his...

his memory belongs to the collective. And I think part of what was so powerful about her intervention, which was really calling all of us to account for the ways that we take people's memories and use them, was that she was interested in speaking as much or maybe more to folks on the left than folks on the right. She was just like, look at how you've taken my son from me. And so I took that to be an interest in thinking about

how Black death becomes something that is a spectacle and something that we spectate, right? And something that becomes a kind of currency as much for the left as for the right, albeit in different ways, right? And so I think one of the things that was so interesting about that article was to think about

For those of us on the left, for those of us who write about Black death, what is an ethical way to witness, which is to stand with, to notice, to attend to, to pay attention to, to do justice to without rendering loss a kind of spectacle or taking it. Like I thought to myself, what does it mean that this mother who's lost her child

feels like even her memories are not her own anymore, right? And how do we as scholars, as activists contribute to that by re-narrating certain forms of death? And what would it mean to think about a different kind of narration that's about attention to without rendering a spectacle? And I don't know that I know the answer to that, but I think that that's part of what that difference between witnessing and spectating calls us to think about.

questions about, I think this leads sort of beautifully into this next question, which is, you know, you have these questions about the creation, the function, and the ethics of archives of Black loss that runs throughout the book. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit, I was particularly interested in the way that you talked about how Natasha Trethewey is navigating these questions as she's thinking about different forms of records, right? When she's talking about the loss of her mother. Yeah.

So I was wondering, yeah, I guess if you could talk about that a little bit, or if you want to talk about sort of the ethics of the archives using a different sort of example, that would be great as well. Yeah. I mean, I think just to back up a tiny bit, I mean, I think this question of

The ethics of archives has become a kind of central question for Black Studies via Hartman and Venus in two acts and thinking about what's recorded, how we as scholars engage with what we find in the archive, how we think about our desires vis-a-vis the archive, and how we can

how we think ethically about our engagement with the archive. So I think those are like central ethical questions that Black feminism has given us as we think about archive. I think what's interesting about Trethewey's memoir, Memorial Drive, is that she's trying to think about what can be useful to her across a variety of forms of archives, all of which are imperfect. And so she has what she calls the official archive, which is the archive of

Police records and newspaper clippings about her mother's murder, which contain information that she herself did not remember, right? Or that she didn't know. And what's so interesting about that official archive is the book starts with her returning home only to learn that the official archive of her mother's murder is going to be deleted.

is going to be deleted, right? That it's kind of the clock has run out and it's no longer needs to exist in its paper form. And so if she wants to see this archive, she needs to see it. And so there's that kind of official archive, which contains a set of information that she didn't necessarily have, and maybe a set of information that's not, that's clinical in its account of loss. And then she has her own archive, which is also imperfect, which is the archive of memory. Which I think is part of what I want to highlight in my book is that

I mean, I think there's a quote by Elizabeth Byers, a poet who I love that, that memory is as imperfect as anything. And I think there is this way that feminist theory generally, Black feminist theory in particular, often think about memory as a kind of truth, and it is, but it is, it is an imperfect truth.

And so Trethewey talks about how she has her own memories, some of which are complicated by the official archive. And so I think what she's trying to do in Memorial Drive is she pieces together the story of the end of her mother's life, which is also the story of her coming of age, is to move across these archives and to try to figure out how to locate something that feels like it does justice to her mother's life as she moves between them. And I think that's

I think that's one of the key questions I said at the beginning that Black feminist theory has tried to answer, right? So we have like Hartman answering that question through critical fabulation and like, I'm going to devise another form of writing.

that does justice to what I want. And that in some ways uses the historical archive as a jumping off point for imagination. And we have someone like Trathaway was like, I'm going to navigate among these various kinds of archives to assemble something that feels like it honors my mother. So I think in some ways, like they're asking similar questions and maybe answering those questions in slightly different ways.

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So I want to move on to chapter three, where you write that the epistolary form invites readers to eavesdrop. I really loved this. Would you mind talking about this a little bit? Yeah, sure. So that chapter was really interested in a proliferation of texts during Black Lives Matter that took the form of the letter. And I was interested in how this form seemed to be

everywhere and deeply familiar, right? And each time I encountered it, it felt intimate precisely because it was not addressed to me. It was addressed to someone else, even as I knew that was a device, right? Like it was addressed to someone else and it positioned me as someone who was listening to a conversation that did not anticipate me. And so we might think of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me as a kind of quintessential and maybe most public example of the Black Lives Matter movement.

epistolary, but it's a form that Imani Perry takes up in her book, Breathe, which is also a letter to her sons. And what's so interesting about Perry's book is the book is written as a letter to her sons. And at the very, very end, she breaks that form. And she's like, one of the things that I was thinking about is what this book might look like if it was not a letter, right? And so she has this kind of shore meditation thing.

on what the letter form makes possible and what it makes impossible. And so I wanted to think about how one of the things the letter invites us to do, even as I think as readers, particularly in this era, we know it's a device, yet it gets under our skin, right? It positions us as people who are

transgressively listening to something that didn't anticipate us. We're getting access to information that we wouldn't have otherwise. So if we think about Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, right, like the idea was we were, we readers were getting access to a conversation between a Black father and his Black son about how anti-Blackness operates. And with Imani Perry, we're hearing a conversation between a Black mother and her two Black sons about her

her feeling of anticipated grief and loss and how she navigates that and how she prepares herself and her sons for the violence that she feels is inevitable. And so what's so interesting to me is even as we, and by we, I mean like you and me and Black feminists, not we, like the American public, even as we already know that violence,

There's something about encountering it in this intimate form, a conversation between Perry and her sons that lets it feel, I think, that lets it get under our skin, I think, in a way that's

That's particularly provocative. In your fourth chapter, which is titled Picturing Loss, you contend that, quote, contemporary Black feminist writing is visual, unquote. Will you explain this a little bit and how contemporary Black feminist writing is using images to engage with and to live with loss? Sure. Yeah. So I think the best example is Saidiya Hartman's White Weird Lives, which

which builds on i think the work she's doing in venus and two acts to construct what she calls an album so thinking about the visuality of black feminist writing an album of wayward girls and women or she calls ordinary color girls who were living freely and differently and boldly at the turn of the century and so i think what's so what's so interesting about wayward lives is it's a book

that feels like a family photo album insofar as Hartman will include text and images. The images don't have captions in the text. If you want to know who the pictures are, you have to flip to the very back of the book. And oftentimes the captions are

fairly vague, like woman at the beach, or like girls in the sun. And you're like, okay. So there's this way in which you encounter these figures and you don't know who they are. You just encounter them much as I say in the book, as I have the experience of looking through a family photo album and seeing people who sort of look like me.

And I start to imagine a set of connections between me and them, right? Like, oh, maybe that person has my eyebrows. Or like, oh, those ears kind of look like mine. Like, maybe these are my people. Which is about my projections and my desires and my desires to claim a historical past that may or may not have wanted me to claim it. And so what I'm trying to think about is how...

This form of writing that is both visual and discursive makes that possible that in a way, the writing, particularly a black feminist history has become a project that invites us readers to claim historical actors and to see them as our people, which is, I mean Hartman causes intimate history as a that's her method.

And I want to think about how this form of writing that straddles the visual and the discursive makes possible that intimacy. It allows us to not just visualize the past, but we see the past and we can touch it when we're face to face with these images of folks

who, again, we encounter just like on the page without necessarily explanation of who they are, which invites us to tell our own stories about them or to forge connection with them. And I should say, I say this, you know, in the book about beautiful writing more generally, I think it's writing that aspires to move its reader. There are plenty of people who are not moved. And I think, I think the work of the writing that I'm interested in is to ask those people to,

what's wrong with you? Like, why aren't you moved? And I think the same is true of Hartman's Wayward Lives, right? Like I read it, my own experience reading that book as a Black woman is looking at these pictures and thinking like, are these my people? And of course, that's not the experience of all readers. But I think the fact that Hartman both anticipates a Black woman reader is in and of itself a political act. And second, that the work of the image calls the question for you as a reader, are these your people? Like,

What desires do you have vis-a-vis the people who you see photographed in this book? Which I think is part of the ethical work of beautiful writing to pose those questions on the most intimate of scales.

I want to stick with Wayward Life's beautiful experiments because I really appreciated your reading of the image that that text closes with. Would you mind kind of walking us through that? Yeah, I'm going to see if I have my book here. I don't. It's a beautiful image of birds flying in formation. And I was interested in that image because...

all of Wayward Lives, which is a book that contains many photographs, all of the images that are of people, particularly, mostly groups of girls and women engaged in leisure activities. It's women at the beach, it's women dancing, it's images of what Hartman calls the chorus. And then we have this closing image of these birds in formation. And for a long time, I was really curious about how and why we moved from

the human figure to this image of that's both abstract and that centers the non-human. And so I wanted to think about this idea. I mean, I think part of what Hartman is trying to do is to think about how the chorus, her term, the collective is an image that's both abstract and representational, right? Because I think what's so interesting about

birds in formation is like you can't see individual birds right you see this kind of beautiful shape and it's organized like I you know I don't know if you're in Texas I don't know if you ever see like sometimes here we'll just have these mornings where you see these beautiful shapes of birds flying across the morning sky and I always think like

If only the left could be organized like that. Right? It's just like, it's kind of magnificent site. And so I was really interested in like what it, what it meant for Hartman to want to close with this image of a collective where you cannot necessarily single out the singular, where what we see is the shape of the group in its entirety. There is of course,

something really romantic about that. And I think there's something romantic about Wayward Lives. Like, I think she, there is this way in which she is not interested in tension or disagreement or antagonism. She's interested in the beauty of the chorus. And anyone who's ever been in a group knows that groups are full of antagonism. But that's not her, like, where her heart is in that project, I think, is in thinking about the beautiful

abstract shape of the collective and the sense of velocity and speed, which I think is also part of what we get when we see this kind of beautiful image of birds in the sky is like they're moving quickly. And I think she's interested in how

the women and girls who are at the center of her book are living at a certain kind of speed, like a kind of imaginative speed. They're rewriting what was understood as what Black life could be, and they're doing it quickly. And I think she's interested. So I think that kind of metaphor of the birds moving through the sky is precisely what she's interested in about the women and girls in her book, like what it means to move collectively

and with effort and my speed. Yeah. As soon as I finished How We Write Now, I had to go back and reread Wayward Lives. And thinking about the way that you read that image, like really did change the way that I engaged with the book overall, which of course, like you could read that book a million times and engage with it. I think in a million ways, it's so incredibly rich and brilliant. But yeah, so I just really appreciated like engaging with your book and taking that reading of the image with me as I went back through the book.

Um, so you conclude by asking a question about how Black feminism might create tools for thinking about the Black paternal and about this figure's capacity for tenderness, um, which I just thought was so fascinating. Can you, um, yeah, just talk about this a little bit about the Black paternal? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think, um, much of the book is rooted in, uh, my parents and watching them

individually age differently and watching and then being present to support them through their respective aging processes. And I was really interested as I was writing the book. And some of this came out of a lovely conversation with Kevin Grosche at the first Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute, where Kevin said to me, you write so much about your mother. Like, where's your father and all this? And I was like, oh, it's interesting. And I said to him, it's I have all these tools from

being immersed in a Black feminist theoretical tradition for thinking about mother, mothering, mother work, motherhood, compulsory mother. Like I have so many tools and I have no tools for thinking about the figure of the Black paternal except that it's a figure of absence in the Black feminist archive. And that became a curiosity for me. And as I say in the book, it's not out of a desire to like valorize Black men for doing the

the necessary care work that's part of the reproduction of life, but it's simply out of a desire to think about what it might mean to take that figure seriously. I was interested in tenderness and here I must shout out my amazing grad student R. Morris Levine at Duke who's interested in a project on tender writing. I was interested in thinking about tenderness as a way of thinking about a set of questions apart from care, which I think is a term that has been used so much

That sometimes I think it's lost its meaning for black feminists. And so I was, I was interested in tenderness because I was interested in both what it means to

be open and vulnerable to loss, to the complicated circuit of feelings that are part of loss. And I was also interested in the ways in which anyone who's ever, say, gone to the dentist knows that a dentist will sometimes say like, oh, is this spot tender? And you think about that feeling of like the achiness that's part of tenderness, that feeling of like a place that's been touched or rubbed too much that's just a little bit too sore. And I was interested in that as also part of the story of

loss. And so I think what I'm marking at the end is my own desire for a kind of Black feminist theoretical work that can, first of all, think about the variety of ways we might contend with the Black paternal. And I should also say, like, I think there's been a lot of really amazing Black feminist theoretical work, particularly from the 1970s, that wants to think about

the enduring problem of black patriarchy which is an enduring problem that needs the recession um but i think that that's the primary way that we thought about the black paternal and i think there's there's i know that there's more to say and i think tenderness might be one route not the only route for thinking through how we might contend with the kind of like ghostly figure of the black father in a kind of black feminist archive

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And so I was wondering what you would like readers to do with what they learn and what they take away from Howie right now. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's such a lovely question. I think part of the book is animated by a desire to call attention, renewed attention to the space of the Black ordinary, you know,

Over and against this kind of, I think, hyper-intention to the spectacle. So I think that's one thing. Second thing is I'm interested in having us think more about what loss means for our archive. Like, what is... I do think we've arrived in this moment where loss is the primary thing that Black feminists want to write about and think about. And I think...

I don't even do this much in the work, but actually spending some time thinking through what the variety of ways that loss gets theorized across our work, what it means, what it feels like. I have a moment in the book where I say something like, I actually think we don't fully know what loss is because it can mean so many different things. Sometimes loss can feel really liberating.

Right? Like losing a job that you hated can feel great. Right? And sometimes loss can feel like everything has been upended. And we use that same word to think about both of those things. I say at the very beginning of the book, I spent most of the beginning of my academic life moving. And I remember the feeling of the loss of familiarity with even my office, that feeling of like, where's the bathroom? How do I use the Xerox machine? That that's the same word we use to describe the feeling of

slowly losing a parent to say dementia or Alzheimer's. So I think a kind of black feminist parsing of what loss means and how we might want to think about it is important. And then I think, you know, I had an interest, I don't know if I'll do it or not, in thinking about the kind of markets that have sprung up around, publishing markets that have sprung up around black feminist writing. And I am really interested in a conversation about

the grief economies, the commodification of Black feminist grief and the kind of publishing desire to replicate books about Black women's loss. And so I'm interested in conversations about that as well. So yeah, that's, I mean, that's some stuff I hope people do with it. I should also say like I wrote this book and it's a weird book for me and I didn't know how it would move in the world. And one of the things that's been unexpected for me is just like having people write to me and say,

My mother has Alzheimer's or like my brother died and I find comfort in this book. And like, I did, to be honest, did not expect that as writing this book. I did not, I did not know that anybody else would find themselves in this story. And so that's for me been like a really,

lovely and unexpected thing that's emerged from the book is actually realizing how loss can be the basis for forming connections and community with folks who I don't know and realizing how much of loss is shared. So I mean, much of the book is about my mother's experience with Alzheimer's and so much of Alzheimer's is scripted and familiar. Like you read these books that are like, here are the eight stages of Alzheimer's. And when you meet people who care for someone who has Alzheimer's,

it's the experiences are quite shared, right? You can say, oh, does your mother also get really anxious when it gets dark at night? You know, like these are their shared experiences and realizing how shared they were was actually in some ways, like comforting for me. So it's been interesting to see how loss can forge communities where I didn't expect them to be created. Can I ask you what you're working on currently and also where centers find you and your work?

Yeah, sure. Working on two things at the same time, which is weird. Working on a traditional scholarly book that is tentatively titled Black Feminist Arithmetic that's about the variety of ways that Black feminists have used numbers and counting to imagine different forms of social justice.

So that's a kind of, I say traditional scholarly book because it's like, we know what that is. And then I'm working on a collection of personal essays, or just to say not a traditional scholarly book that's called My Mother's Clocks Essays on Black Loss, which kind of picks up on some of what I was interested in and how we write now, but is a book that's not academic in its aspirations and hopes to reach a larger public that's interested in questions of grief and loss.

um where can you find me is how the second question was i'm at duke university you can you can find me um my books are available at duke university press my website at duke lists all my publications and um come visit our gender sexuality and feminist studies web page you can find out more about me there thank you so much for being here today thank you yeah my pleasure