This book has a complicated provenance.
I began to write about race the day after the holiday party in 2005. I am grateful to the universe for bringing me to that awful intersection and pulling me through it.
I began writing poetry after reading Lucille Clifton’s Good Woman in 2007. I am grateful to Ms. Clifton for lighting the way.
In 2012 I began an MFA at California College of the Arts where I spent a good deal of time writing about race. I wrote a poem on race in seven voices called “A Day at the Races” for Joseph Lease’s class, and am grateful to Joseph for urging me to publish it.
In 2013 I published that poem in a journal cofounded by one of my former students, Tanaya Winder, called As Us, which features the work of indigenous and underrepresented women. I am grateful to Tanaya for giving me my start as a published poet, and for seeing in my nationless mixed-race experience some solidarity with the experience of displaced indigenous people.
In 2013 I adapted that poem into a script for San Francisco’s Poets Theater run by Small Press Traffic. I am grateful to Small Press Traffic for the opportunity, to director Brandon Jackson for his vision and tenderness as he staged my words, to Kelsei Wharton for documenting the experience, and to each actor for their careful consciousness: Yvorn “Doc” Aswad, Alonzo Cook, Ashley Hill, Ruth Marks, Estelle Piper, Luke Taylor, and Saroya Whatley.
I continued writing about race at CCA with the urging and support of many classmates and faculty including Stephen Jamal Leeper, Donna de la Perrière, Judith Serin, Dodie Bellamy, and Faith Adiele.
This book emerged from my master’s thesis at CCA, which I wrote under the guidance and direction of Juvenal Acosta and Faith Adiele. I am forever grateful to the two of you for all but forcing me to go there.
I am grateful to my brother Stephen Xavier Lythcott for writing about our slave ancestor, Silvey, and to Silvey herself and everyone in between her and me for being and enduring and ultimately giving me life. To my extended family. To my mother and father. To Avery, Sawyer, and my beloved, Dan.
And as ever, I am grateful to the people who turned this manuscript into a book: my editor and my agent, the fierce and fearless Barbara Jones and Kimberly Witherspoon, and their entire teams at Henry Holt and InkWell Management.