Stephanie Andrea Allen's Blog, page 4

Celebrating Black History: All Day, Everyday

Disclaimer: this really isn’t an essay, but it will have to do. Like many of my #52essays2017 cohort, I’m struggling to write this week. But hey, words are words, right?

So while I celebrate and educate folks on Black history and culture (American history and culture) EVERY SINGLE DAY, this year, I’ve decided to be a bit more intentional about sharing some of that material in this space. I credit my parents, especially my dad, for instilling in me a desire to want to know as much about the hi...

#4 Living My Best Writing Life, Workshop Edition

Yesterday, for the first time in two months, I met with my writing group. I had no idea how much I’d missed them.

The last time I’d seen them was in November, and then only briefly. I’d been in Montreal at a conference, and only popped in to the video conference for a minute or two before running off. That was also the week after the election, and I’d been seriously considering going off the grid and staying in Canada (come on, I wasn’t the only one!). We’d taken a break in December to give e...

10 Works of Black Lesbian Short Fiction

So happy to see so many wonderful collections of Black lesbian fiction!

WOCreads

Recently, I was asked about short story collections by women of Color, and what a timely thing, too, since I’m planning on reading more short fiction this year. Collections are always a bit complicated for me: on the one hand I want to take my time and savor each story, treat it as a complete work by itself (as should be, unless it’s interconnected stories), but on the other I usually fail and pressure myself t...

#3 A Brief History of My Cats

For as long as I can remember, my family has had cats. Mama said she’d had a dog, Wallace, when she was a girl, but other than that, cats.

Theresa was our first cat. I don’t remember much about her, but I do remember that she was gray and white, and had at least one set of kittens. What I remember most about Theresa (and I have no idea why we named her Theresa), was her death. I think I was about eight and my sister Angie maybe six and a half when Theresa died. It was a balmy summer morning w...

Another Brooklyn

My latest over at the BLLC Review!

“I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.”

Thus ends the hauntingly beautiful lyrical novel Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. This was my first foray into Woodson’s work, and I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d read that she was an amazing writer, and she has a National Book Award to prove it. Yet, I’d...

Better Off Dead

My mama is convinced that we would be better off if she were dead.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my parent’s den, watching television with my daughter when suddenly, we heard a loud wail erupt from my parent’s room. We were both startled, but didn’t get up; the sound had become familiar. For the past several months, my mama has been prone to bouts of crying, which is strange, given that for most of my life, I’d rarely seen (or heard) her cry. Not when her parents died, or when she had a s...

#1: Transitions

On August 4, 2009, I loaded up my car and with my ex riding shotgun, made the twenty-seven-hour drive from Spokane, Washington to West Lafayette, Indiana to start graduate school. It was a transition of grand proportions, I’d gone from working in corporate Americato teaching high school English to working in the multicultural affairs office at a community college. Now, I was finally going “home.” I’d always known that I wanted to be a professor; in Ms. Jackson’s ninth grade English class I’d...

#52essays2017

Call me crazy, but I just committed to writing an essay a week for the next 52 weeks. Why, you ask? Well, mainly because I need to get back to a consistent writing schedule. Since graduating with my doctorate in late 2015,I’ve been hit or miss in regards to keeping up with my writing time. I managed to write quite a bit last year, (I finished several short stories), but I know I can do better. This public challenge is a means of reminding myself that I’ve committed to writing specific content...

2016: A Review

Over the past several days, I’ve read (and enjoyed) quite a few of these “year in review” blogs/essays and it got me to thinking. What did I accomplish in 2016? Where did I fail? I realized that I had many more successes than failures, and that made me feel pretty darned good about myself. I also realized that there were a few times where I fell short or was disappointed byothers. First, an overview of the major accomplishments:

2016 was the year that I co-edited and published my first title...

Stephanie reviews Don’t Explain by Jewelle Gomez

My latest over at The Lesbrary!

The Lesbrary

Don’t Explain is a collection of short stories by Black lesbian author, activist, and philanthropist Jewelle Gomez. Most widely known for her Black lesbian vampire novel The Gilda Stories, Gomez’s Don’t Explain is a collection of nine stories that employ rich, sensual, language to introduce readers to several carefully constructed characters whose stories set our minds and bodies afire. Although the collection was written in 1998, the stories are...