“Magnifique Noir Book 2” Exemplifies the Magic of Self-Care

by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Jan 10, 2020 | Book Review, Feminism, Identity, lesbian, LGBTQIA+, Reading, Representation, The Afro YA

“Magnifique Noir Book 2” Exemplifies the Magic of Self-Care

Created by Briana Lawrence, the illustrated novel series Magnifique Noir tells the story of Black queer young women as they come of age as young adults and as members of the magical girl team Magnifique Noir.

Book 2 of the series picks up a few weeks after the ending of Book 1. In the aftermath of a difficult battle, the new generation of the magical girl group Magnifique Noir is trying their best to move on. As they start to balance their everyday lives with their magical ones, the past comes back to haunt them in unexpected ways.

A noteworthy theme of this book is the pressure on Black women to be “the strong one.” Black women are always expected to put everyone else before themselves. Even though they are magical superheroes, the ladies of Magnifique Noir are still human. They have to learn to check in with themselves and each other. This is especially apparent in the book’s first two chapters, in which one of the girls is having nightmares about the team and their loved ones dying — a development that reflects the influence of the Japanese anime series Madoka Magica. The darkness of the situation is softened by the display of concern from her friends and her eventual decision to talk about the nightmares.
Another theme, related to the insistence that Black women be strong, is the expectation for Black women to always be wholesome. Rooted in respectability politics, this expectation denies Black women agency in terms of how they present and express themselves. A later chapter comments on this theme when the ladies attend a burlesque show inspired by Magnifique Noir. Kayla, a Black female burlesque dancer, is slut shamed by a white woman for her sexually charged take on Magnifique Noir’s Cosmic Green. Even though their superhero identities are a secret, Magnifique Noir stands up for Kayla as civilians.

This book shows Black women that they don’t always have to be strong or perfectly wholesome.

The decision to tackle the expectation of wholesomeness as it applies to Black women sets this book apart from other works inspired by magical girl anime. Given that the magical girl anime genre primarily features schoolchildren and was originally targeted at kids, it is rare to find books about adult magical girls doing adult things like seeing a burlesque show. Yet there are still some sparkly sweet moments could easily fit alongside classic magical girl manga like Sailor Moon.

One of my favorite moments takes the form of an illustration called “8 Bits of Rainbow” by artist Fried Unicorn Rainbow. It is a small yet dynamic and colorful piece depicting an awesome team-up between Magnifique Noir members Cosmic Green and Radical Rainbow. Another memorable illustration is “Rest Well, Magical Girls” by artist coloured_braids. It features three of the ladies in PJs sleeping together in the same bed. It is a tender moment captured well with pink pillows peaceful expressions, and the amusing contrast between the girl’s sleepwear.

In addition to illustrated moments, there is also great dialogue, scenes, and entire chapters devoted to queerness. One highlight features the character Marianna Jacobs figuring out how to define her asexual orientation with the help of Blaze, Magnifique Noir’s leader. The moments that build up to this one sensitively portray Mari’s orientation as something she is new to, but not something that she needs to change. Another notable moment is the romantic tension between Magnifique Noir’s Radical Rainbow (a lesbian) and Prism Pink (confirmed by the author to be a trans woman). Their scenes together capture the nervousness and excitement of having a crush very well.

One final bit of praise must go to the backstory about the old members of Magnifique Noir. While there are still some questions left unanswered, what is revealed is done in a way that will shock and perhaps surprise the reader. It was also great to see an older woman like Blaze growing a little closer to the girls and becoming more involved in their civilian lives as well as their magical ones. In this way, she becomes more like an auntie spending time with her nieces.

Adding a darker tone and some mature content, Magnifique Noir Book 2 continues to deliver a wonderful coming-of-age storyline with affectionate, powerful, and fun moments. This book shows Black women that they don’t always have to be strong or perfectly wholesome. No matter what you have to work through or how unwholesome you might seem, you are still magical.

—> Learn more about Magnifique Noir at the author’s website.

The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.

Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.

What’s Currently Shaping My Writing

by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Apr 23, 2019 | Feminism, Identity, Meet Our Authors, National Poetry Month, NPM 2019, Poetry, writer's life

What's Currently Shaping My Writing

Emily Corwin

1. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982, directed by Amy Holden Jones)

2. “lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to” playlist

3. Barbara Creed’s film theory on “The Monstrous-Feminine,” what it is about woman “that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.” Creed explores the way the female body is coded in the horror film as victim and as monster, as sexual and virginal, as spectacle and agent. And that’s what I am trying to do as well.

4. Oculus by Sally Wen Mao (Graywolf, 2019)

5. Shiny Insect Sex by Stephanie Lane Sutton (Bully City Press, 2019)

6. The Criterion Channel

7. Glitter, specifically glitter paste

8. I’ve become nocturnal lately. My partner works at night and I’ve been adopting his schedule a bit. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I got in my car and headed west. I was aimless, just kept driving until I felt moved to stop. There’s this cemetery on the other side of town, and I found myself driving past its gate. My headlights passed over the red tulips sprouting at the low stone wall. I felt drawn to them—the tulips—and decided to park. There was moonlight, and I wandered down the gravel path, my eyes passing over the headstones and shadow.

9. Agnès Varda, French New Wave and documentary filmmaker who passed at the end of last month.

10. Taking the bus every day for work. It demands that I observe and take stock of my surroundings, inside and outside the bus. Looking at my phone makes me motion-sick, so I just look up instead. I get to see what people are wearing, what the traffic and weather is like; I get to say good-bye to this town.

11. Daughter-Seed by Arielle Tipa (Empty Set Press, 2019)

12. Ingmar Bergman’s spooky Swedish films

13. The flowering trees at night—the redbud and dogwood. I went for a night-walk recently. The air was warm as bath water, and I just had to slip out the door and try it on. I walked two miles toward the empty cornfield, intending to visit my favorite tree. But I heard this loud, reverberating noise coming from the nearby neighborhood. So I veered left and followed the sound. It was birds—hundreds of them—in this little copse at the end of the drive. The noise was overpowering and ethereal.

14. Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pens (the 22 pack is very good)

15. This color-wheel tote bag

*My Tall Handsome* is available for purchase directly from Brain Mill Press and from print and ebook vendors everywhere.

“The twenty-first-century witchery that sprinkles glitter everywhere in My Tall Handsome allows for us to cheer on the speaker in her quest for finding love, seeking revenge—or even raising the dead.”—Ploughshares

The fanged fairy of Emily Corwin’s forest-mud-stained collection asserts and sings with short rhymes and glitter-spells, and just as you’ve followed her into the deepest and darkest part of the woods, terrified, you’re asked to run away together / and promise to never / do this heart-skipping thing / with anyone else.

Don’t be surprised when you find yourself answering yes, yes, yes.

Confronting and darling, every word a perfect warm circlet of pink blood, My Tall Handsome raids every crystal jar on the lace-topped vanity for truth, poison, and song until you can’t remember why you ever thought pretty was better than powerful, sugar was better than bitter medicine, or dancing needed more music than your own voice.

I sip the goblet down, tip it upside down / wear it as / a hat / I am a new shiny thing / and I steal you away from the hoopla hullabaloo rumpus

You won’t resist this kidnapping into the orchard, into the crabapple abracadabra—it is too crystalline a taking, and there are too many delicious chants to chant along the way.

“When the cutie-pie was opened, the birds began to sing, and what they sang was glittery and savage and fearless and dangerous—be careful with this book.”—Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device

A Selection from My Tall Handsome

Emily Corwin

my tall handsome, you are always

hydrangea in my rib, popped open

always dazzle of salt on my punched lip

love of life

the he & me I will devour

we beneath black cherry tree

all fruits and crystals on your chest

you were my first body—now and always

forever and ever, in the pink bed rippling

amen.

About Emily Corwin

Emily Corwin is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Gigantic Sequins, New South, Yemassee, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press), which were published in 2016. Her first full-length collection, tenderling, was released from Stalking Horse Press in 2018, and she was a finalist for the 2018 Pleiades Press Editors Prize. Her manuscript Sensorium was chosen as an Editor’s Choice selection for the 2018 Akron Poetry Prize and is forthcoming with the University of Akron Press.

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month

For this year’s National Poetry Month at BMP Voices, we seek to celebrate the ways in which we’re interconnected — highlighting community, gratitude, and the ways in which creativity redounds upon itself, fed by collective energy and goodwill. Our fee-free contest is open to all styles and forms of poetry, with an eye toward our mission of discovering voices that are immediate, immersive, and urgent. Poems inspired by the work of others are welcome. We also welcome poems written to other poems or poets.

Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon

by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Apr 5, 2019 | Activism, disability, Feminism, Identity, LGBTQIA+, National Poetry Month, NPM 2019, Poetry

Editors' Choice Poems

Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Robin Gow, Jessica Nguyen, Danny McLaren, and Uma Menon.

We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.

i had a dream they took out my uterus & handed it to me.

Robin Gow

my uterus was an ornate vase
& i asked, “what am i supposed
to do with this?”
the doctor shrugged
he was in a suite & tie &
had lavender gloves
he suggested i use it to collect something.
i stuck my hand in deep to see
if there was already anything in there,
found a ring i lost maybe four years ago
& i wondered how it got there.
silver claddagh waiting
scraping up against the glass
lining of the vase.
it had something to do with hope,
i think a uterus does even if you
take it out
& discover it’s
a shoe box or an urn or a vase.
i tried other items, starting
with buttons, snipping them off
all my clothes so that i would
have more. clear buttons, black buttons,
brown buttons, red buttons, all of them
inside the vase, i thought they might
transform, i thought that might
be the point of the strange object
but nothing happened. i slept
holding the vase & imagining
what it was like inside me
what kind of objects it hungered for.
i talked it, i told the vase that
i was sorry this was how
everything had to happen.
i bought flowers after flowers
to let sprout from the vase’s mouth:
lilies, carnations, roses
& i’d keep asking
the uterus, “are you happy?”
but the vase wouldn’t respond.
emptying out the greenish stem-water
left over from the flowers
i stuck my hand in again
only this time i felt an ache
in my chest as i did, a kind of
phantom connection, a hand under skin.
i wept, it was something about hope
for something; a hand searching
under skin for lost objects,
the ring like a kind of opening
for beetles or other insects
to crawl through. i was scared
it might always be like this
if i kept the thing around.
i had to break it.
no, not in the driveway or the street,
a push from the counter in the kitchen
where all glasses & plates
will eventually shatter.
the pieces on the floor like
teeth of an unknown monster.
i apologized to the uterus
as i cleaned up its pieces.
i took a bowl from the cupboard
& began filling it with buttons
out of habit or maybe
some kind of hope. from the buttons
grew the stems of flowers,
only the stems.

About Robin Gow

Robin Gow’s poetry has recently been published in POETRY, The Gateway Review, and tilde. He is a graduate student at Adelphi University pursing an MFA in Creative Writing. He is the Editor at Large for Village of Crickets, Social Media Coordinator for Oyster River Pages and interns for Porkbelly Press. He is an out and proud bisexual transgender man passionate about LGBT issues. He loves poetry that lilts in and out of reality, and his queerness is also the central axis of his work.

perks of a half-deaf wallflower

jessica nguyen

one.
it’s so much easier to sleep
lying in bed,
on my “good ear”
– whether it’s thunderstorms or my partner’s snoring,
I am able to slip past silently through the night
no baby can wake this baby up.
everyone envies my mornings
since they see no traces of dark circles
under my eyes
they’d ask,
“what’s your secret?”
who knew that my disability could be a celebrity-level beauty hack?

two.
the drill fire alarm comes in-oh wait, that’s not a perk.

two.
I can pretend to not hear you
and use my deafness as a legitimate excuse.
–
this especially works when I am not particularly fond of you.
this also works when I am not paying attention to something that I should’ve been paying attention to
“oh, sorry. what’s that? I couldn’t quite hear you the first time. can you repeat what you said? thanks.”
(smirks)
I swear it’s the truth sometimes.
.
three.
during trials and interviews,
“we can’t hire you because you-“ oops, that’s not a perk either.
.
three.
I got extra time on my ACT tests.
didn’t think that having my time limit doubled would help me on this kind of standardized testing, since only one of the four of the subjects required listening to begin with…
but I did get a small private room to myself with no pencil scratching and people breathing
.
four.
I got the same ACT score as my last one.
and I wasn’t even given the extra time last- wow, I need to stop. what is the definition of self-actualization again?
.
four.
I am everybody’s right hand person. the ones who’ve passed my friendship test re the ones who remembered to walk on my left. you can tell who the strangers are – they are the ones who I dance tango with as I quickly sashay to get to their right side.
.
five.
walking into every classroom
I wore an fm unit like a prop, which consisted of a hearing aid for me and a microphone for the teacher to speak into, which means having to blow my cover as I approach

now, I could expect the spotlight to be on me – yes, the star actor who deserved an oscar for passing as a full hearing person, coming up on stage to deliver her speech:
“I’d like to thank lip-reading and body language – I wouldn’t have been able to get to where I am today without them.”

all confused eyes would be on me,
sometimes awkward silence,
but mostly attention
to the quiet girl sitting in the front
because isn’t what being half-deaf means?
getting all the special attention?

six.
I can find my teachers easily when I need them. it’s great because if the teacher rushes out of the classroom, I always know where they go.

one time, the bell rang and it was the quickest I’ve seen a teacher leaving the room (I can understand his urge, though)
the problem was that he was wearing my microphone so I had to chase him down.
and of course, I thought it’d be cool to spy on what he was doing through my hearing aid. so, I did.

and what I first heard seconds in
was the sound of of a stream,
which lasted for…. a while.
then, a toilet flushing.

About Jessica Nguyen/Nguyễn Thị Mai Nhi

Jessica Nguyen/Nguyễn Thị Mai Nhi is a world traveler, activist, and writer. Though having lived in the U.S. for most of her life, she hops from one country to the next in hopes of discovering pieces of home to fill her Asian American soul. Known to be a soft-spoken person in the real world, she often channels her feelings through her writing as she finds written words to be just as powerful as when they’re spoken. Jessica plans to publish her own chapbook, “softly, I speak” in the near future. To learn more about her current projects, please visit her website at byjessicanguyen.com or follow her @byjessicanguyen on social media.

Spark Joy

Danny McLaren

Do you ever wonder if your gender sparks joy?
If it fits you like a glove, if you love the way the words sound in your mouth or leave your lips,
How it feels to say ‘they’ with your own tongue
And know better than anyone else how to say your own name?

Does your gender excite you?
Does it hum in your veins, electric, ignited,
Keep you up at night, tossing from panicked to delighted, thinking
what if I’m a boy?
or what if I’m nothing at all?

But ‘nothing’ seems scary.
My gender isn’t scary.
Sure, it’s loud, and it’s big,
It takes up too many seats on the bus, makes the up-tight man on the left of me scoot over one.

But it’s dynamic, and powerful, and strong.
It repels close-minded like a magnet,
And pulls kind and ‘knowledgeable about feminist theory’ my way.

It’s ‘too many beers on a Saturday night’ euphoric,
It spills across my clothes when I’m not careful,
Or, on some days, when I try really hard to make it seen.

My gender beats in my chest when I run,
or while I wrestle into my binder.
Constricting my chest with freedom, just to look a little more me.

My gender kisses me goodnight, and greets me with the sunrise,
And marks up my skin with ‘I love you.’

Do you ever wonder if your gender sparks joy?
If you feel ‘just right’ with the words you choose to use
To tell others who you are?
Maybe you should
Because it feels damn good.

About Danny McLaren

Danny is a queer and non-binary writer who uses they/them pronouns. They are an undergraduate student studying Gender Studies, and beginning to dabble in queer, anti-racist, and anti-colonial theory. They have an interest in exploring themes related to equity, resistance, and intersectionality in their work, and often write about their gender, sexuality, and mental health through these lenses. They can be found on twitter at @dannymclrn.

shopping for a necklace

Uma Menon

About Uma Menon

Uma Menon is a fifteen-year-old student and writer from Winter Park, Florida. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and National Poetry Quarterly, Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, and the Cincinnati Review, among others. Her first chapbook was published in 2019 (Zoetic Press); she also received the 2019 Lee Bennett Hopkins Award in Poetry.

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open

For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like... the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.

“Demons Are Not Fearless Black Boys with Imagination,” “Lake Girl,” and “Baby Island”

by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Apr 5, 2019 | childhood, Feminism, Identity, NPM 2019, Poetry, Racism, Representation

Editors' Choice Poems

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Jeremiah Davis, Meg Eden, and Riley Welch.

We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.

Demons Are Not Fearless Black Boys with Imagination

Jeremiah Davis

Shape a universe into a butterfly then release it. Bribe the
dark spaces in your heart to let you create an estuary of
flowers. Pray like an off key piano and celebrate the fifth
grade memory when it was so simple it was a blessing to
dream and live it again. Tell your broken maestro he is
worthy of the song he’s been practicing. Talk with the
instrument in his passion. Let go. Let go. Let’s go. Let it go. I
never understood why crows were not called ‘black doves.’
They are just as beautiful. I never understood why the black
boy was never allowed to know he had the liberty of
dreaming off topic. They are just as beautiful.

Jeremiah Davis is poet as well as an author. He has been writing poetry since grade school. Jeremiah started writing to better battle mental illness and overcome bullying. He has been published in The Perch Magazine, Phemme Zine, Junto Magazine, and more. He is twenty-two with aspirations higher than his age. More of his work can be found here.

Lake Girl

Meg Eden

Meg Eden’s work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She has five poetry chapbooks, and her novel “Post-High School Reality Quest” is published with California Coldblood, an imprint of Rare Bird Books. Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal.

Baby Island

Riley Welch

Riley Welch is a poet from Texas living in Denver. Her work has previously appeared in The Write Launch and Authentic Texas Magazine, among others. More of her poetry can be found at her blog, arhymeaday.com

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open

If It Weren’t for Daphne Gottlieb

by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Apr 5, 2019 | Book Review, Feminism, LGBTQIA+, National Poetry Month, NPM 2019, Poetry, Popular Culture, Reading

Poetry Month Spotlight

Jessie Lynn McMains on the Poetry of Daphne Gottlieb

If it weren’t for Daphne Gottlieb, I wouldn’t be a poet.

That sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true. Okay, I might have been a poet even if I’d never read her work but my poems wouldn’t be as brave. Since the summer of 2001, when I bought Why Things Burn at Quimby’s in Chicago, her poems have given me a map for writing about the hard things—rape, addiction, mental illness—right alongside poems in praise of love, desire, rebellion. (But hard love, desire like a car crash, rebellion because you’d die otherwise; which is the way I’ve always experienced those things.) For eighteen years her poems have taught me ways to write the truths of how women, queer folks, and other non-normative bodies move through the world. How we armor ourselves, adorn ourselves. How we survive and find joy.

Daphne’s poems often involve an insertion of herself/the speaker into pop culture, history, or the literary canon. Much like Kathy Acker did in her prose (Daphne was a recipient of the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant-Garde), taking source texts from the canon and making her hero(ine)s pirates and knights, Gottlieb’s poems ask: why can’t a girl be an outlaw, an adventurer, the author of her own story? Why can’t a girl be a Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty, rather than just a Camille or Marylou?

Daphne’s poems aren’t easily categorized. Her work blends elements of performance poetry and “academic” poetry (as her official website bio states: “[Gottlieb] stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue”). Form-wise, her poems run the gamut from a more traditionally structured lyrical style to prose poems and other experimental forms. (I once nearly got into a bar fight with a dude who dismissed her entire oeuvre because she writes prose poems, and he said, “prose poems aren’t really poetry.”) So this is another thing Daphne has taught me—how to use my words as a bridge between school and street, stage and page. How to be both glitter and gutter, simultaneously.

Here’s a hard truth—sometimes people like us and those we love don’t survive. But maybe more than anything else, Daphne’s poems have shown me that I can use words to give my ghosts breath. Poems can be houses for the dead to inhabit, and every time someone reads those poems, they are again briefly, gloriously, alive.

About Jessie Lynn McMains

Jessie Lynn McMains is a poet, writer, and publisher. They are the author of multiple chapbooks, most recently The Girl With The Most Cake and forget the fuck away from me. You can find their personal website at recklesschants.net, or follow them on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open

Poetry Month Spotlight

by mainbrain@brainmillpress.com | Apr 1, 2019 | Feminism, Meet Our Authors, National Poetry Month, NPM 2019, Poetry, Reading

Poetry Month Spotlight

The Bare Lit Anthology

About The Bare Lit 2016 Anthology

Literature by writers of colour published in the UK remains overburdened by a bulk of constraints. Often it fixes complicated narratives to personal struggles, consigning them to domains of the confessionnal, inner moral clashes, and the impossibly tragic.

The inauguration of the Bare Lit Festival in February 2016 marked a significant turning point. Rather than centring writers’ work around prescriptive themes, the festival looked to open possibilities beyond them. Through readings, conversations, panels, and performances, we were adamant to overcome the anachronism that exists between the vast spectrum of work produced by writers of colour and the kind of exposure they receive. With the generous help of our audiences and supporters, Bare Lit was able to honour their work both artistically and financially.

The accompanying anthology builds upon this achievement. Calling on participants and writers of colour UK-wide, we asked contributors to submit their writing in line with the aims and ethos of Bare Lit. The response was overwhelming—thank you to everyone who contributed.

We received over a hundred submissions of prose and poetry covering an impressive range. Writers took us on flights of fancy, pandering to multiple worlds while engaging us in their literary imaginations. Every submission was carefully discussed and considered on the premise of originality, relevance, and often a certain kind of gut feeling.

The selection presented here brings together original, previously unpublished works of contemporary prose and poetry by established as well as lesser known writers, giving both the opportunity to work with this volume’s brilliant editors, Kavita Bhanot and Courttia Newland, who have honed each piece to its utmost and without whom the anthology would not have been possible. The final pieces cover an unimaginably vast scope, reflecting the wide, and at times irreconcilable and contradictory, range of themes and the political élan present in the work of writers of colour in this particular period. In this sense, they are not canonical but anticanonical, and vested in the many global and diasporic vernaculars.

—From the foreword by Bare Lit co-founder and anthology co-editor Mend Mariwany

A fiction and poetry anthology in support of the Bare Lit Festival, showcasing award-winning British authors of color.

In 2016, a group of UK authors of color founded the Bare Lit Festival: the first ever literary and author festival featuring only UK writers of color. Bare Lit collects short stories and poetry by literary luminaries whose work represents the values and mission of the festival. Edited by Kavita Bhanot, editor of Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, Courttia Newland, author of The Gospel According to Cane, and Bare Lit Festival cofounder Mend Mariwany, all proceeds of this anthology go toward direct support of the Bare Lit Festival for authors of color.

The Bare Lit Anthology is an excellent way to read and discover talented BAME poets working in the UK.

BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month — Break Poetry Open

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