Breath, Voice, Fire
- Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
Breath | Voice | Fire is a compilation of three creative nonfiction essays written in response to the rise of anti-black violence and the existential crisis of blackness currently at the forefront of social unrest in America. The concept is based on a creative writing trope (breath, voice, fire) that connects the violence that continues to occur as a result of anti-black racism to the notion of systemic racism in America. This work contrasts literature from the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, Russian literature, biblical narrative, and postmodern existentialist philosophy to construct an understanding of the zeitgeist or the “Spirit of the times.”
Endorsements (2)
“Sharon Kimberly Williams’s Breath, Voice, Fire is an amazing symphony of deep spiritual and poetic vocals, intellectual and epistemological pathfinding, and political daring that make Black life in America and around the world dreamable. Very much like one of her heroines, Nina Simone, Williams has insightfully and creatively read and reflected the material times of Black life in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America but also what Christina Sharpe calls the residence time of Black life—the longue durée of Black life. In Breath, Voice, Fire, Williams gives the reader the multidimensionality of Black life and its capacity to live and thrive against the odds and beyond any moment.”
“This is a beautiful book for an ugly time, a troubling book for a troubled time. With poetic proficiency and an activist sensibility, Sharon Kimberly Williams crafts a searing antiracist manifesto for a turbulent downward-spiraling America.”
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