Maya Angelou has said, “Thank you, always say thank you; it’s the greatest gift you can give someone; because thank you is what you say to God”: Áṣẹ. In this wisdom, I say thank you to God, to all of God’s manifestations in the Orisha, Saints, to all of my ancestor helping spirits, and to all of my guardian angels for the blessing of life and the vision, fortitude, love, joy, creativity, and care they provided me in bringing this book to life. I am grateful.
My thanks to the institutions that have offered financial support and intellectual community to me toward the completion of this project: a Scholar-in-Residence Program Fellowship sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; a Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, which supported this project and my next; two summer research grants from the University of Texas at Austin John L. Warfield Center for African American Studies; special research grants from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin.
I am indebted to several community and national organizations—Zami Incorporated in Atlanta, the Unity Fellowship Church in Baltimore, and Fire & Ink—that helped me to spread the word about my research, which helped me to attract research participants for interviews across the country. My gratitude also to Priscilla Hale and Rose Pulliam of Allgo in Austin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind in Durham, Ruth Nicole Brown and SOLHOT (Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths), Kerry Ann Rockquemore and the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDC) along with Kathryn Gines and the NCFDC writing group I participated in, St. James Episcopal Church in Austin, The Riverside Church in New York, and the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, who have provided the love, community, space, and encouragement that kept me well, grounded, clear, and committed while writing this book.
My terrific research assistants deserve so much praise. Porshé Renee Garner masterfully helped organize the final bibliographic information I had amassed over the years of working on this project. Maya Berry, my research assistant at the Schomburg Center, helped me retrieve and organize hundreds of pages of archival documents and other research materials. Their skillful assistance came at key times in my work, and I am thankful.
I thank all of the archivists and librarians who have assisted me in locating resources to write this book. Diana Lachatanere, Steven Fullwood, and the entire staff of the Schomburg archive and library were so helpful in locating materials I needed. I am especially thankful to Steven Fullwood for his important work curating the “In the Life” Archive (formerly Black Gay and Lesbian Archive) at the Schomburg. It has been a gem of a resource for all of my projects and for others doing work on Black LGBTQ life, history, culture, and politics. My thanks to the late Taronda Spencer, former head archivist at Spelman College, and her colleague Kassandra Ware, as well as the staff of the Emory University Manuscript and Rare Books Library. In addition, I’d like to thank the trailblazing elders Barbara Smith, Jewelle Gomez, Louis Hughes, A. Billy Jones, and Gil Gerald for the valuable insights they shared with me about Black LGBTQ cultural production and activism that proved to be very helpful in reconstructing important details of the social history of Black LGBTQ literacy and rhetoric.
This book is far better for the feedback of those who read early drafts. Two anonymous reviewers from Southern Illinois University Press, Gwendolyn D. Pough, Deborah L. Brandt, Craig Werner, and David Glisch-Sanchez each read the entire manuscript in draft form, and I am thankful for their thoughtful comments. Beverly J. Moss, Meta DuEwa Jones, Cherise Smith, Tamika L. Carey, Roderick Ferguson, LaToya L. Sawyer, and Badia Ahad each read a portion of the book in draft form. I am also thankful to them for their astute observations and for taking time from their own work to support mine. Colin Palmer, past director of the Schomburg Scholar-in-Residence Program, assistant program director Venus Green, and my Schomburg fellows cohort—Sherie M. Randolph, Robyn Spencer, Sandra Duvivier, M. Thomas J. Desch-Obi, and Myisha Priest, as well as continuing Schomburg fellows Carolyn Brown, Carter Mathes, and Laurie Woodard—provided thoughtful feedback on an early version of chapters 2 and 3 of this book.
I am so grateful for the editorial and production staff of SIU Press, including Wayne Larsen, Linda Buhman, Ryan Masteller, and Lynanne Page. I am especially thankful for my editor Karl Kageff. Karl’s enthusiasm, patience, and support have made the publication of my first book a pure pleasure.
I have been blessed with wonderful mentors and colleagues that supported my work and me from the start. Among them, the late Nellie Y. McKay, Deborah Brandt, and Craig Werner have always been a triumvirate model of scholarly rigor, pedagogical brilliance, and generosity. Nellie McKay will forever be a paragon of scholarly excellence, and her mentorship is legend among scholars that span generations. I am grateful to have known her, been taught by her, and been one of the students who benefited from the once-in-a-lifetime community she and her colleagues created at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Deborah Brandt is more than a literacy scholar nonpareil. Her wisdom, goodness, and courage have been an astonishing example. My work and, indeed, my life are better for that example as well as her generatively challenging questions, keen insights, deep encouragement, and reminder to “be about it.” Craig Werner is both a superlative scholar and work of art in the classroom, and I am grateful for every single conversation we’ve had about this book, for his feedback on early drafts, for his uncanny ability to bring writers back to the heart of the matter in their work, and for the Aretha Franklin Tapestry in Black mixtape he made and shared with me that accompanied me through many late nights and early mornings writing. Each of them are more than colleagues, they are family.
I am grateful for colleagues who have been generous with their time and advice, written work that has shaped my intellectual growth, and above all, represent ways of being in the professorate that provide the best models for success alongside wellness. Among them, Stanlie James has been a consistent source of support and enthusiasm since I first stepped into her classroom at Wisconsin many years ago. Jacqueline Jones Royster has been encouraging and generous with her time stretching back to my then only budding interest in literacy, composition, and rhetoric. As with Royster and others, Gwendolyn D. Pough’s scholarship has helped create and hold space for Black feminist literacies, composition, and rhetoric wherein my book on Black queer literacies can even be possible in the discipline. Finally, Roderick Ferguson has also been generous with his time and encouragement, and I am grateful for his trailblazing work in queer of color critique that has been sustenance to me and so many other scholars forming and affirming our own aberrations in scholarly discourse.
Thank you to Charles Morris, David Ikard, Mark Anthony Neal, Simone Drake, Jonathan Alexander, and Jacqueline Rhodes, who each so kindly invited me to share in journals, anthologies, and other scholarly volumes they edited portions of this project, my next project, and extended work. I thank Beverly J. Moss, Elaine B. Richardson, E. Patrick Johnson, and Cheryl Wall for their enthusiasm and generous use of time supporting me during my work in the professorate.
A special thanks to all of the colleagues with whom I have presented on panels, discussed writing and research, met for writing groups, or had the pleasure of building community and sharing significant space with in doing this work including: Bonnie Williams-Farrier, Tamika L. Carey, Elisa Norris, Denise Valdes, LaToya Sawyer, Jenn Fishman, Cedric Burrows, G Patterson, Sherie Randolph, Stacy Macias, Deborah Vargas, Andreana Clay, Blair Smith, Ruth Nicole Brown, Delicia Greene, K. J. Rawson, Michelle Gordon, Qwo-Li Driskill, Rhea Lathan, Tyrone Forman, Calinda Lee, Scot Brown, Michan Andrew Connor, Anastasia Curwood, and Mary Frederickson. Thank you to “G.G. Shenneticans,” my dear friends and writing group—Courtney Marshall, Heidi Renee Lewis, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs—who provided daily accountability to my work, self-care, laughter, and community as I finished this book and other projects. My gratitude forever to my soul sister Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose love and friendship has been the best inspiration to, in the words of Audre Lorde, be who I am and do what I came to do. Thanks also to Brilliance Remastered and the participants in the workshop “Guardian Dead: Ancestor-Led Intellectual Practices” that Alexis and I co-facilitated in December 2013: Beth Bruch, Dana Iscoe, Lokeilani Kaimana, Amrah Solomon, Mirna Carillo, Patricia Torres, and David Glisch-Sanchez. The magic of that space we all created together has continued to shape and reshape my commitments as an ancestor-led, community-accountable scholar, and in Fashioning Lives, the ways I continue to think, write, and be about ancestorship. I am grateful to Ruth Nicole Brown for meeting to write together around Champaign-Urbana. Sabrina Harris, Kate Braun, and Eva Lott have each kept me spiritually grounded and committed to my self-care and well-being in my personal and professional life, and I thank them.
My deep gratitude to my colleagues and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, with special thanks to the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of English and the Center for Writing Studies (CWS). A special thanks to Dale Bauer, Jose B. (J. B.) Capino, Candice Jenkins, John Labella, Peter Mortensen, Ricky Rodriguez, Sandra Ruiz, Spencer Schaffner, and Siobhan Somerville. I also thank Amy Rumsey, former office manager of CWS, for her warm spirit and all of her work there. In addition to the English Department and Center for Writing Studies, I am lucky to have colleagues and graduate students across the campus that have made and so generously share community and space with me. My deepest thanks to Toby Beauchamp, Betsy Bigsby, Alberto Brandariz Núñez, Ruth Nicole Brown, Durell Callier, Laura Castañeda, David Cisneros, Cynthia Degnan, Julie Dowling, Porshé Renee Garner, Delicia Greene, Tiffany Harris, Jonathan Inda, the late Ronnie Kann, Fiona Ngo, Mimi Nguyen, A. Naomi Paik, Maritza Quiñones-Rivera, Jessica Robinson, Alicia Rodriguez, Sandra Ruiz, and Pasha Trotter.
My start as a professor began at the University of Texas at Austin. My thanks to the faculty, staff, and students of UT-Austin’s Department of Rhetoric and Writing, Department of English, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. In Austin, I had the pleasure of working alongside Meta DuEwa Jones and Jennifer M. Wilks, who I wish to thank for being such terrific friends, kind people, generous colleagues, and part of my chosen family in Austin and beyond. My thanks also to UT-Austin faculty and staff colleagues Jossianna Arroyo-Martinez, Alan Baker, Elizabeth Nicole Thompson Beavers, Sharon Bridgforth, Sergio Cabrera, Jessica Dunning-Lozano, John Fleming, Edmund Gordon, Frank Guridy, Omi Jones, Dave Junker, Lee Ann Kahlor, Stephanie Lang, Stacy Macias, Deborah Paredez, Melissa Phillips, Shirley Thompson Marshall, Stephen Marshall, Carlos E. Ramos Scharrón, Sharmila Rudrappa, Cherise Smith, Christen Smith, and Deborah Vargas for their generosity and support. Also, I had the honor and privilege of spending many, many hours talking about great scholarship with the graduate students in my courses and I thank all of them, with special thanks to Daniela Gomes Da Silva, Lokeilani Kaimana, Sequoia Maner, and Alfred Martin Jr.
My scholarly research and writing on Black queer literacies and rhetorics began during my years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my time there was made lovely by the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Afro-American Studies, the Composition and Rhetoric Program, and the Department of English. I am thankful for my work to have developed under the mentorship and support of Deborah Brandt, Michael Bernard-Donals, David Fleming, Cecilia E. Ford, Brad Hughes, Stanlie James, Nellie Y. McKay, Martin Nystrand, Craig Werner, and Susan Zaeske. My thanks also to Afro-American Studies and English faculty members Sandra Adell, Henry Drewal, Christina Greene, Robert Livingston, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Richard Ralston, Freida W. High Tesfagiorgis, Michael Thornton, Tim Tyson, William L. Van Deburg, and Morris Young, as well as administrative staff professionals Trina Messer, Rhonda Danielson, Spring Sherrod, and the late Jean Comstock, who always made me feel at home. I also want to thank all the graduate students with whom I was blessed to have matriculated at UW-Madison, all of whom made a lasting impact on my thinking as we shared space in classes, chatted in the libraries, discussed our budding projects, and laughed and ate together. Among them I thank Maria Bibbs, Matt Blanton, Asha Collins, Rasha Diab, Hope Ealey, Mary Fiorenza, Tanisha C. Ford, Beth Godbee, Michelle Y. Gordon, Brenna Greer, Phyllis Hill, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Rhea Lathan, Crystal Moten, Tiffany (Mercado) Sedillos, Chrissy Stephenson, and Shannen Dee Williams. My thanks also to Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. (GOMAB!) and Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., particularly Madison and Milwaukee frat and sorors. Madison still feels like home for me when I visit thanks to Sandra Adell, Susan Zaeske, Mary Lou Roberts, Cecilia Ford, Donna Dallos, Deborah Brandt, Steve Wajda, Craig Werner, and Leslee Nelson, who have opened up their homes to me and my partner at various times on the few brief visits since leaving “The Isthmus,” or shared meals, memories and laughs with us on other occasions.
As my years in Madison drew to a close, I moved to Ann Arbor where I completed my dissertation. Paul Farber, Tayana Hardin, Cookie Woolner, Tanya Perkins, Erica Allen-Little, Milton Little, Brenna Greer, and Matt Blanton comprised the perfect community of support that year and continue to be dear friends, and I thank them very much, as I do my beloved alma mater The Lincoln University of Pennsylvania. In particular I thank the Department of English, Black Studies Program, and the Honors Program, and my undergraduate professors and mentors who encouraged me to be a researcher and writer in the professorate and to go to graduate school: Ropo Sekoni, Gladys Willis, Benson Prigg, Emmanuel Babatunde, Jeff Hoogeveen, Veronica Cohen, and Genyne L. Royal. I would never have learned about Lincoln had it not been for Principal Shirley Dye and the Clara Muhammad School, to whom I remain grateful.
Throughout my life I have been blessed by the love of all my “besties,” dear friends, and elders who are also among my family of choice: Brenda Auterman, Ruth Nicole Brown, Sergio Cabrera, Tamika L. Carey, Trinise Crowder, Nadia Czesky, Oliver Delgado, Jessica DeShields, Daimon Deshields, Demita Frazier, Clyde Gumbs, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Toni Guy, Phyllis Hill, Tenisha Hudson, Louis Hughes, Gary Hunter, Avery Jackson, Reagan Jackson, Stephanie “Rhythm” Keene, Heidi Renee Lewis, Erica Allen-Little, Milton Little, Terrence Liverpool, Jessica Dunning-Lozano, Stacy Macias, Courtney Marshall, Ihsan “Ziggy” Mujahid, Muna Mujahid, Melissa Oliver, Cheryl Ousley, Tanya Perkins, Laura “Pinky” Reinsch, Genyne Royal, Theo Sanford, Nick Sedillos, Tiffany Sedillos, Blair Smith, Julia Sangodare Roxanne Wallace, Tina Marie Walters, Lee Jonathan Williams, Shannen Williams, and of course, “Solidarity”—Ebony Alston Hunter, Chinwe Eneh, Shameka Erby, and Dana Fields-Fauntroy.
I am also grateful for all the members of the bonus family I have gained through my partner: Sonia and Fernando López; Esmi, Ed, Luke, Jacob, and Mia Hams; and Luis, Adrianna, Marissa, and Tatiana Mejia. I am especially thankful to have gotten to know the late Carmen Sánchez and Irene “Nena” Blanco. I want to thank the entire Pritchard family, the Brooks family, the Burns family, the Washington family and all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins therein for their encouragement and support throughout my life. In particular I thank my grandparents, the late Charles Edgar Pritchard and Gladys Janet Brooks Pritchard; my brothers Avery and Travis; my cousins Jasmine, Jontay, and Jelease; my sister-in-law Stacey; and my five nieces and nephews: Tajanei (“Taj”), Avery Jr. (“AJ”), Tiana, Corey, and Layla, who each inspire me every day to work hard to make the world better than I found it. My aunt Loretta “Lorry” Pritchard, who helped my mother raise me, passed away the morning I defended my dissertation. She was the epitome of wit, compassion, joy, and New York City tenacity. I thank her for her example and for being with me even beyond death.
This book would not exist without the Black LGBTQ people who agreed to share their stories with me. They are the foundation of this work, and I thank each and every one of them for their enthusiasm and for giving hours of time to talk with me about their lives and literacies. I pray that you will read these words and see your truths in this book and that you will take pride in this book because it belongs to you.
I have dedicated this book to my mother, Anntrette “Kitty” Pritchard. I wish for every child, and especially every queer child, to have a mother who was as loving, affirming, and encouraging as mine. She nurtured every single one of my dreams, and believed in me when I did not believe in myself. It was always my wish to have her hold this book in her hands. My heart breaks as her death means that this particular wish did not come true in the way I imagined when I started this book, but my soul has taken solace in knowing that she was with me every single time I sat down to work on this book. The mantra of my own restorative literacies is, as Glinda tells Dorothy in The Wiz, “believe in yourself,” and I thank my mother for telling me these words my entire life so that I could be brave enough to bring forth this work.
Lastly, there has been no greater joy than the past eleven years I have spent fashioning a life with my husband and best friend, the intrepid David Glisch-Sánchez. David has been with me every step of the way. His love, laughter, kindness, encouragement, deep spirituality, and sweetness matter more to me than anything in this world. David has been championing this book from the very first word I wrote to the very last. He read the whole manuscript and listened to me talk about it almost every single day for years, and he was so kind as to display an excitement that never appeared to wane. He reminded me that taking care of myself was the most important part of the work, and he joined me in meditation, walks, trips to the movie theater, pedicures, shopping, coffee breaks, and the little bits of self-care that made writing a book more humane than I imagined it ever could be. David was joined in this loving care by our “dog-child,” the adorable Madison Sánchez-Pritchard. Madison sat quietly next to me while I wrote and was a great companion whenever I took a break just to play, walk, or cuddle with him. I am easily the luckiest person on earth with these two by my side.