|
|
|  | | Black Poetic Feminism: The Imagination of Toi Derricotte
Dr. Niama L. Williams brings to light poet and memoirist Toi Derricotte's claiming of voice through her poetry rich in metaphor, deep and profound sensibility, and brave personal honesty.
Sexual abuse happens. Domestic violence happens. We know it happens. We have child protective services. We watch Law and Order: SVU. We are surrounded by sex in our media, and we are surrounded by sexual violence in our media. Yet I have turned to the work of Toi Derricotte because we are not surrounded by sexual violence in our literary criticism, because we are not discussing sexual violence in our college classrooms, because the work of a poet like Derricotte, a poet who reveals the long, difficult trajectory of the emergence of voice, of the emergence of a healthy, vibrant, bisexual self, | |  | | Brown Women
Black women on both East and West Coasts as well as those from literature are lauded by poet Niama L. Williams in her tribute to their tenacity, strength of will, and determination to positively influence the young of our culture. See if you can find yourself or someone you love in one of this poet's sharp and accurate portrayals.
The women she's known and loved. The women who've raised her. The Brown Women in literary works who've seared their stories into her memory. Women who have survived, women who ensure the survival of others. Women who love when love consistently threatens to walk out of the door. Women who create where only barrenness is expected to exist. | |  | | Detective Fiction
Sequel to The Journey, the white psychiatrist is aided in his haunting of the second-sighted Black female graduate student by a tv detective and a truck unloader from across the hall. The plot thickens!
Is the drop-dead gorgeous psychiatrist in love or is some other far more nefarious plot afoot? The Journey pulls us in and leaves us wondering. Told she was schizophrenic at 19, it takes a trip to an unexpected homeland for the real truth to sink in: she is not crazy, but psychic. Raised by a degreed registered nurse and thus devoted to Western medicine, the hardest person to convince is herself, but by the end of Detective Fiction, the game between her self, her spiritual helpers, and the doppelganger who refuses to leave her alone becomes cold, calculating, and a clear risk to her survival. | |  | | Famous Faces
Black feminist poetry at its best. Love, race, gender and glimpses of the tripartite oppression unique to the Black woman who writes yet overcomes it all.
Chris Abani. Barry Manilow. Wynton Marsalis. Jerry Quickley. Jody Kuykendall. The already famous and the one on her way up. Articles in the newspaper, paparazzi bait, sought out for the alumni newsletter, for international halls of fame, for Pulitzers, Emmys, Grammys; recipients of some, winners of many. But what of the poet, toiling away in her room, alone, who watches, understands, yet never feels a part of their world? What of the poet who watches their performances, sees beneath their words, their music, imagines the pain that created the art, uses her understanding to convince herself to, | |  | | Joseph's Story
A tale of fury mediated by a tale of love through two surviving histories of child abuse. Will their love survive their pasts?
Bravely she risked telling him of her feelings, though she had never confronted a man with her ardor before. He stunned her by revealing the passion he had been working so hard to hide. Now they are faced with the prospect of living together, aligning dual inheritances of domestic violence as children as well as sexual abuse. Will their pasts dive-bomb their relationship or will their love overcome all resistance? Will their love survive his fear of commitment and her resemblance to the grandmother who tortured him as a boy? | |  | | Opening The Sheila Dennis Reader
Homelessness, doctoral-level intellect, starvation, mind games, pride, torture--all come to the fore as a middle-aged Ph.D. confronts homelessness in Philadelphia. Will she overcome the trials that beset her or will her faith be sacrificed?
Dr. Niama L. Williams writes books that describe her life to give others reassurance that their thoughts, perceptions and feelings are not abnormal, insane or unique. In this text, she tackles the bear of homelessness as a Ph.D. with no job and no savings. Her armor thickened only by faith and 11 published books under her belt, she takes on the women and leaders of Sheila Dennis House and barely survives, yet leaves ennobled, empowered, and sure that she will never run away from a fight again. | |  | | Ruby
Survivors who love risk their sanity and faith more than anything else. Will this reverend and his beloved be able to bring love and matrimony into their relationship when his fear of God tells him he must journey alone?
She never thought love would make a home in her life. At twelve he prayed to be the perfect husband, but he did not find perfect love until his 76th year. They come together with oddly complimentary histories of domestic violence, emotional neglect, and ostracism. Ruby is the story of how they fall in love and the wonderful magic that ensues. | |  | | Sex, Blood, & the Mountains
An escape for an urbanite to a mountain stream in the Oregon hills brings to the surface poetry of a natural eroticism that no one expects, least of all the poet herself.
She is on the run, and doesn't know it. She is running to a freedom she has always wanted, but does not know how to claim. Her inner wildness is finally surfacing, but she has limited time to explore it; is on unsure feet as it rears its head and surveys the territory. She only knows that she must have it, this freedom, again and again and again. | |  | | Sojourn in Calidia
Cassie Daniels doesn't know who is after her, but she does know they want to foil the guerrilla leader's plans. Can she be a true help to him when the balance of her own mind is in doubt?
She's on the run and she doesn't quite know who is pursuing. Is it the man with the unrecognizable face? The boy with the eyes that terrify? The man dressed as a campesino who doubles as The Interrogator's assistant? Who IS pursuing Cassie Daniels and what is her real mission in Calido? Sojourn in Calidia takes us through urban landscape, steamy jungle and a variety of human consciousnesses--some of which we hope never to see again--as we tease out this young Black woman's journey in a land not of her birth but definitely of her spirit. | |  | | Soul Work
Spirituality and militant Black feminism meet where the highest art intersects. A highly educated Black female poet with a taste for T. S. Eliot ruminates.
Soul Work. The people one loses one's head over. The faces that haunt you long after death--death of love, death of affection, cessation of passion. The countenances and spirits that occupy cherished space between heart and lung and consciousness: Niama Williams gives voice to both, puts in words the entities--water, rain, that psychiatrist who took your heart, the glen in the outback where you sought to escape him--that make us speechless. Travel with her as she puts names to the unnamable, as she affixes words to that which had struck us dumb. Find your tongue. Watch her lash out. | |  | | Steven
A collection named for the gifted filmmaker Steven Spielberg, a book that explores the stereotypes we are given by Hollywood and their effect on us all.
Dr. Niama Williams' STEVEN is a psychological triumph. This long overdue Song of Survival, punctuated by the cataclysmic overtures of epiphany, minimalist agreement, and happenstance, is proof that the arrival of the truth does not always come via verbal messenger. From the beginning with "Schindler's List," Dr. Williams asks the film’s director to explain, “robbing a people of their origins." She poignantly points out that Middle Passage descendants live without a traceable identity and unlike the majority, “…cannot fabricate what was deliberately stamped out of existence." Dr. Williams' text | |  | | Sweet Fields
The tv detective, the reverend, the psychiatrist, the truck unloader from across the hall--all have haunted her psyche and plagued her heart. Who will win in the end or will her sanity betray them all?
Sweet Fields was where they met and it took her years and cataclysms to remember. She knew that he had always wanted to tell her something, something that he was bursting to say, but that he was her David returned to her--well that she had no idea was looming large in his consciousness. Now she must worry if it is too late to try to find him and let him know that she is finally ready, finally strong enough, if the doorway is still open, if the spiritual connection has not grown too taut and broken. | |  | | The Journey
The trip away from home, a home spotted by abuse and deep love, into the torment of graduate study and first love. All with a psychic gift lurking in the shadows.
What does it mean to be young, Black, female, intelligent, gifted with second sight, on your way to a Ph.D. and in love for the first time? The Journey presents us with exactly this young woman. The pivotal question becomes is she sane and he deceitful, or has she lost her mind? The answer is both. Not an easy, cohesive ride, the narrative thread of an African American female mystic falling deeply in love with a white psychiatrist is complicated by a gently suggested history of abuse, graduate school, and the subtle racism of still largely white academia. The Journey strokes the American psych |
|
|
|
