In How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash reminds us that even as Black feminist writers get as close to loss as possible, it remains a slippery object that troubles memory and eludes capture.

Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of Birthing Black Mothers, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality, and The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, all also published by Duke University Press.

Preface: Beauty, or All about My Mother  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
1. Beauty, or All about Black Feminist Theory’s Mothers  1
2. Staying at the Bone  25
3. An Invitation to Listen  48
4. Picturing Loss  69
Conclusion: New Furniture, or All About Black Feminist Theory’s Fathers  91
Notes  99
Bibliography  117
Index  127