“Trauma, Tresses, and Truth” Book Event at Green Apple Books (Inner Sunset)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us on Monday, January 16 at 7pm PT when we celebrate the release of TRAUMA, TRESSES, AND TRUTH: UNTANGLING OUR HAIR THROUGH PERSONAL NARRATIVES, at 9th Ave! Featuring contributors Judy Juanita and Adrienne Danyelle Oliver, and editor Lynette Wanzer.

Masks Required for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online at the link below
https://youtu.be/7z4_zSH4BGk

Praise for Trauma, Tresses, and Truth
“Trauma, Tresses, and Truth offers vivid vignettes of individual and collective episodic memory. There is an urgent need for collective healing that invites Black and Brown women to tell their stories from the crown down. Trauma, Tresses, and Truth seeks to unseat and decolonize our natural hair stories, redirecting entire eras of grief into rediscovery, rebirth, and reclamation of our ability to choose our hair stories.” —Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka, founder and CEO of PsychoHairapy 

“Trauma, Tresses, and Truth is abundant with important messages, historical truths, and acts of everyday heroism and defiance in the face of the worst kind of racism, the kind that refuses to recognize itself. Contributor Dr. Raina León asks, ‘what is freedom? is there a peek of it in this history?’ Through a weaving of deeply honest, emotional stories, these survivors of cultural trauma provide an intellectual and emotional laying on of hands so that the next generation can heal and find their freedom. This powerful collection is an important addition to minority studies and a necessary contribution to the process of Black women taking back their crowns.” —Tara Lynn Masih, editor of award-winning The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays

“The story of Black women’s relationship to our hair comes with many layers. It’s beautiful like a fresh set of box braids, relaxer-burn painful, and somewhere in between. Through the experiences of amazing Black women writers, Trauma, Tresses, and Truth tells the complexities of Black hair culture with authenticity and heart. Each page gives the reader an insightful blend of powerful storytelling and prose with social and historical context, all making Trauma, Tresses, and Truth another crown in the literary discourse of Black women’s hair.” —Jeneé Darden, journalist and author of When a Purple Rose Blooms

About Trauma, Tresses, and Truth
Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair.

From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military squadrons, Black and Afro Latina natural hair continues to confound, transfix, and enrage members of White American society. Why, in 2022, is this still the case? Why have we not moved beyond that perennial racist emblem? And why are women so disproportionately affected?

Why does our hair become most palatable when it capitulates, and has been subjugated, to resemble Caucasian features as closely as possible? Who or what is responsible for the web of supervision and surveillance of our hair? Who in our society gets to author the prevailing constitution of professional appearance?

Particularly relevant during this time of emboldened White supremacy, racism, and provocative othering, this work explores how writing about one of the still-remaining systemic biases in schools, academia, and corporate America might lead to greater understanding and respect.

About the Readers
Judy Juanita’s poetry and fiction have been published widely, and her plays have been produced in the Bay Area and New York City. She has taught writing at Laney College in Oakland since 1993. In 1968, while attending San Francisco State, Juanita served as editor‐in‐chief of the Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. Virgin Soul (Viking, 2013) was her novel debut. Juanita’s writing is archived at Duke University in the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History & Culture, alongside the archives of student activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Eleven of her plays are archived at the Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University (OSU), where her full‐length play Theodicy was a prizewinner in the Eileen Heckart Senior Play Competition in 2008.

Dr. Adrienne Danyelle Oliver, MFA, a writer, hip‐hop scholar, and educator living in Oakland, California, began her natural‐hair journey in 2004 while living in Little Rock, Arkansas, where negative perceptions of natural hair were alive and well at the time. She survived her early career as a scholar transitioning to twists and then a ’fro, and Adrienne ultimately arrived at dreadlocks. Adrienne’s academic work appears in Storytelling, Self, Society and Systemic Collapse. She uses creative writing to theorize about a more just education system that honors hip‐hop culture. Her creative work has been published in Digital Paper and The Womanist. Beyond her work as an interdisciplinarian, she mentors other educators as a Bay Area Writing Project teacher consul‐ tant, training others to use hip‐hop sensibilities to cultivate imaginative and inclusive instructional practices. Adrienne has been a VONA fellow and leads a virtual writing and healing circle for Black women. In her spare time, she likes to write poetry, play music, dance, and sing in the mirror à la Issa Rae.

Lyzette Wanzer, MFA, is a San Francisco author, editor, and writing workshop instructor. A flash fiction connoisseur and essay aficionado, her work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, Tampa Review, The MacGuffin, Ampersand Review, Journal of Advanced Development, Fourteen Hills, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Pleiades, Flashquake, Glossalia Flash Fiction, Potomac Review, International Journal on Literature and Theory, Fringe Magazine, and many others. She is a contributor to Lyric Essay As Resistance: Truth From the Margins (Wayne State Press, 2022), Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area (Pease Press, 2019), and Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (Wyatt‐MacKenzie, 2012). Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Lyzette is the current judge of the Soul‐Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s nonfiction category. Lyzette has been invited to present her work and/or panels at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association (CEA), Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Litquake Festival, San Francisco Writers Conference, and others. Lyzette is a member of the National Writers’ Union, in which she served on the Northern California Chapter’s Steering Committee for five years; The Authors Guild; American and Popular Culture Association; and AWP. She has also served on the fellowship adjudication panel for The Writers Grotto. Lyzette has been awarded writing residencies at Blue Mountain Center (New York), Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts (Nebraska), Playa Summer Lake (Oregon), Horned Dorset Colony (New York), Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (Arkansas), Headlands Center for the Arts (California), PlySpace (Indiana), and The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada. She is the recipient of an Investing in Artists grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, four Individual Artist Commission grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, and three Professional Development Grants from the Creative Capacity Fund. Lyzette is working on Professionalize Your Creative Writing Practice: Building A Career as A Literary Artist, a professional development workbook for creative writers. Contact Lyzette at www.LyzetteWanzerMFA.com.

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