Blood Bible

• In Event: Black Creation: Lessons for Living under the Shadow of Slavery and Empire

Abstract

My next book is a relational memoir entitled Blood Bible: An American History. This memoir is historical, cultural, ecological, and geographic by nature. Therefore, it is a meditation on home making and a reflection on Black girl/woman life in the context of New World knowing and hauntings. I use the term haunts here in a very literal way when I consider the afterlives of slavery. Some of the stories in Blood Bible, like many of my poems from A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing and Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, are types of eulogies – meant to encourage something unsettled to speak, because it will not rest. This memoir Blood Bible is a midrash, a deeper telling of what you think you know, a portrait of me and others. How do we curate, create, and understand home? With the lived experiences of Black women in mind, I will give a short reading from this memoir that explores how we conceive of ideas of love and home within the afterlives of slavery.

Author

• DaMaris B Hill, Morgan State University