My book has a title! It will be called Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation. The brilliant Rachel Ake is putting on the finishing touches on the cover, which I adore, and I hope to be able to unveil it sometime in the next month or two. The book itself is currently expected to be out on March 29, 2022, although that could still shift a little between now and then. My partner, Maximus Clarke, took some new headshots too, and this is one of the outtakes.
In other news, I’m putting together a class on what I call Acknowledgement Genealogy. You can read more about it in my latest newsletter, which begins like this: “As laws sweep across the states to prohibit teachers from discussing slavery and its legacy, one thing critical race theory opponents can’t do is prevent people from disclosing their own ancestors’ participation in enslavement and genocide in this country. That’s something all of us with that family history need to discuss publicly. Every last one of us. Systemic change begins with individual choices.”
One thing that makes putting the class together feel a little tricky is that it has (depending on your perspective) a spiritual or at least psychological component. You can read about that in the newsletter, too.
To avoid confusion, I’ve decided to change the name of my newsletter from Ancestor Hunger to Ancestor Trouble. They’re often close cousins, in my experience! But I don’t want to have two different titles floating around.