Deesha Philyaw

Good love.
The email request was that you write about good love for a Valentine’s Day reading event.
The event organizer is also a friend. She’d read your stories and essays. Didn’t she know that you could write about bad love and sexy love—the other types of love to be showcased at the reading—in your sleep?
Or perhaps that’s why she assigned you good love. As a challenge.
“Fuck,” you said. You didn’t need a challenge. You needed a little tenderness.
The weight of this story you’d been asked...

In two of my favorite photos of two of my favorite writers, they are dancing. In one photo, Toni Morrison is at a disco, fine and free, in 1974. In the other, taken a decade earlier in somebody’s New Orleans living room, James Baldwin is bustin’ a move with friends. I cherish these images because they remind me that I’m part of a literary tradition built by people who knew how to get down. They lived and wrote (and danced) in the context of community and of the cultural moments they survived,...

Despite his absence and his negligence, or perhaps because of them, my earliest memory is of my father. We are at the house where I live with my mother and my grandmother. This is the only time I remember him being inside our house in the eighteen years I lived there. In this memory, I’m ...

On October 27,1919, Albert Jeter, a 60-year-old Black man, was robbed of $50 by a uniformed police officer in Pittsburgh...

Jada wasn’t sure exactly when sex after a long day of protesting had become a thing for her and Victor. But it was their thing. Without saying a word, they seemed to agree there was no need to let all that residual energy and rage go to waste. That’s how deep their bond went. Problem was, like most 20-year-olds they knew, they both lived at home with old-school Black parents who didn’t play that coed sleepover shit when they were in high school and were just as devoted to cock-blocking when t...

At the Juneteenth commemoration/Antwon Rose anniversary rally someone takes a picture of my daughters taking a knee. I make a mental note to walk to Home Depot later and buy gas masks for them, which they will probably accept to placate me but not actually wear. Then I remember something about a Home Depot boycott, so I search online for specifics.
The Home Depot query sends me down a rabbit hole. Via social media I’m a virtual witness to the collective chipping away at white supremacy: boyco...

My lifelong bad habit of not reading the fine print has been rivaled only by my bad habit of ignoring relationship red flags. Ignoring the fine print landed my acrophobic ass on a pissed-off horse on the edge of a cliff in Mexico. Ignoring red flags landed me in a second marriage that should not have been a second date. I survived both situations. But only now, nearly four years after that trip to Mexico and nearly three years after I left that marriage, do I realize how the former set the st...

How do you make love to a physicist? You do it on Pi Day—pi is a constant, also irrational—but the groundwork is laid months in advance. First, you must meet him in passing at a S.T.E.A.M. conference. As a middle school art teacher, you are there to ensure the A(rts) are truly represented and not lost amid the giants of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. But as a Black woman, you are there playing Count the Negroes, as you do at every conference. He is #12, at a conference of hundreds. O...

Daz, 37
I’m a marriage-minded individual. That means I believe in marriage. I believe so strongly in everlasting marriage that I’ve added this photoshopped image of my disembodied head surrounded by interlocked wedding rings; the word “marriage” in a fancy, romantic font; a glass of red wine; a bottle of red wine; a piece of sheet music (the “Wedding March”); and a random piece of red fabric tossed ever so seductively, to represent your panties. When I’m not thinking about marrying you, I’m o...

Award-winning Syrian Canadian author and activist Danny Ramadan makes his English-language children’s book debut with Salma the Syrian Chef (Annick Press, March 10). In the book, Salma and her mama have recently arrived in Vancouver from a refugee camp in Damascus. Their new apartment is within a Welcome Center where they live with other immigrants from around the world. Salma’s mama is always busy or sad as she works to establish their new life. With the help of center staff and fellow resid...

How can you be mad at someone who’s dying of cancer? It helps if you don’t yet know she’s dying, if you think the doctors are just trying one more thing....

Not long after adopting her son August a little over a decade ago, Nefertiti Austin went to the library in search of books by, or for, Black mothers, to educate herself on raising a Black child. The librarian pointed her to two books. That was it.
Austin wasn't surprised: "My journey to motherhood as a Black woman was not part of mainstream culture's idea of motherhood, and thus, there would be no funny or ballsy mommy books written by Black mothers on the shelf." The absence of Black women's...

Your soon-to-be-second-ex-husband calls just to say “hey.” But you’ve already begun to forget how it felt to be beneath him.
Today’s forecast: Cloudy, with no chance of ever going back.
Happy hour. And you’re wearing your thigh-high boots and your favorite black sweater with the cleavage-revealing...