Deesha Philyaw

Black women aren’t meant to shovel snow. Rhonda mumbles this as we are knee-deep in the stuff. We have to do it. When it snows heavy overnight, we wake before the sun come...

WHITING HAS BEEN CALLED the “hot dog of the sea” because it’s so cheap. But fishermen love this tasty sport fish because it grabs the lure hard and puts up a good fight.
My father said, “Every Sunday morning while your mother lies across town dying, I will make you fried whiting, grits, and cat’s head biscuits to make up for telling a judge that you weren’t mine. Something to fill your thirty-three-year-old belly for that time I tried to pass you off as my little sister to my new girlfriend, ...

I parked in the shadows behind the hospice center, and waited. I held a box of condoms on my lap, Magnum XLs. It was like being sixteen again, except this time I bought the condoms instead of relying on the boy. This time, the boy was a man I had mistaken for someone I’d gone to junior high with when our paths first crossed two weeks before at the main entrance of the hospice center. I was coming, he was going. I thought he was Daniel McMurray so I stared longer than I should have,...

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...

Zadie Smith loves Joni Mitchell. I hear this in my head, sort of like “Joanie Loves Chachi,” but it’s a far more auspicious pairing in that I love the works of both Ms. Smith and Ms. Mitchell.
The idea that the former loves the latter just as I do made me feel the same kind of gratitude I did upon reading Ms. Smith’s acclaimed 2000 debut novel, “White Teeth”: Here is a smart funny black woman giving unapologetic voice to her passions and observations about life.

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....

by DEESHA PHILYAW • May 11, 20153 Comments. SAMSUNG CSC Item: “Did anybody touch you down there?” Down there, I understood, referred to the ......