“When I read (in the piece about the meeting w/the tap dancer) “Everyone has a purpose” I almost cried. I feel like that’s the central philosophy of everything I do or write. The book is wonderful because it draws up the joy that is within and when necessary, lets us peek at a joy around us we might have missed.”
“If the morning, day or evening was your creation story, how would it sing through your body?
Ever had joy in the span of a relationship with a love so strong that it unzipped within you, “…the need to know how long I have you to myself/as if I was God enough to have a hand in that”? Or maybe the kind of joy that starts with a hello and unfurls into a forever story with no end?
These may be simple questions, but in a world that obstructs Black and Brown bodies from engaging with joy, these questions are acts of rebellion and reclamation.
You encounter all of these inquiries and the dare to joy - out within Black Joy Unbound: An Anthology, a work that is a mix of recipes, mandates, and brazen permission. Work that provides a daring instruction to center a whole meditation focused on delight and joy inviting you into a space of endless possibilities that collide with rhythms, lines, stories and a motion that wills you toward all of the moments when you knew that you were joy incarnate. This collection extends not only an invitation but a bold instruction for you to listen to your heart that is unbound and unapologetic when the balm of joy arrives. And by the last page, perhaps you will be as bold as S. Renée Bess’s character in “Mz. Myjoy’s Joyful Interview” and you will name yourself in such a way that you wear it like a sign to inform and remind you and the world of the thing you must do without question: imbibe, engage and just be the joy that is your birthright.”
BLF Press is an independent Black feminist publishing house dedicated to amplifying the work of Black, Indigenous, and queer women of color. Our goal for this press is to create a space for forward thinking, creative women of exceptional talent. We embrace difference, and envision BLF Press as an outlet for the expression of various types of writing that exemplifies the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and queer women of color and gender expansive persons in the United States.
“HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.”
— The Gospel According to Shug, Alice Walker
Have you added our three collections of Black speculative fiction to your library?
In this daring collection of speculative fiction, Stephanie Andrea Allen attends to the lives of Black women, mostly lesbian or queer, all keenly aware of the forces seeking to consume them.
A Black lesbian working the gig economy runs into a trio of motorized scooters and helps them escape from Earth. An enchanted sleep mask gives a woman the gift of slumber, but what will it cost her? A suburban housewife is framed for murder by her homophobic neighbor. And in the follow up to “Luna 6000,” a young woman investigates her mother’s untimely death, and learns the truth about her family.
Stephanie Andrea Allen’s How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions is an unapologetic, often humorous, foray into the quotidian magic that envelops Black women’s lives. The eleven stories in this collection are filled with characters who will entice and delight readers as they traverse the worlds around them. With a mix of fabulism, near future, and speculative fictions, Allen reminds us in exquisitely nuanced prose that the fantastical can be found amongst the ordinary.