Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood: 2. Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, memoir-in-verse/poetry. Bloomsbury Publishing, January 2022

Attention to the timeliness and intellectual dexterity of Black women is evident in A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing and most of my work. Likewise, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood presents unflinching interpretations of Black girlhood in American culture and beyond. The poems in this book are a type of ekphrasis that is inspired by an exhibit at The Colored Girl Museum in Philadelphia entitled “In Search of The Colored Girl.” These poems reflect a kind of meditation. They detail some of the realities of Black girlhood in national and global contexts. Many of the poems are semi-autobiographical and extend from the collective “knowing” of Black girlhood culture, taking special care to talk about recent Black girlhood experiences that I have encountered in my “middle-aged womanhood.”