Description

---

"An eloquent and perceptive series of essays on Black lives in America" — Kirkus Reviews

In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some of the country’s fiercest debates and most profound challenges.
 
From the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement to the murders of unarmed Black people, this essay collection invites readers to ask questions as much as it asks for accountability. Moving through debates on the 1619 Project to the rippling impact of resurgent white nationalism, the golden thread of each essay is the hopeful continuance of the Black community, as well as a call to greater truth as the first step toward reconciliation.
 
Intersectional, personal, and ultimately centered on truth, love, and perseverance, Black Lives, American Love details and tends to the fractures in American culture. It is a meditation on how we can all do more to secure America’s vastly beautiful possibilities for all its citizens, rather than a few.

About the Author

---

D.B. Maroon is an expert on American culture, an anthropologist, and CEO of an urban research institute. Her essays have been published in The Themed Space: Locating Culture,Nation, and Self and Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity. A committed public scholar, she's appeared in Bustle, Shape, Healthline, and Women's Health. She holds a PhD in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz.

Praise For…

---

"D. B. Maroon deftly encapsulates the personal and political meanings of America's racial conflicts from past to present. She shows us the painful intimacies of America's racial violence, the nation's strides to equitable peace, and how we can all negotiate the precarious space between. In Black Lives, American Love, we witness a gifted writer sharing stories of truth as she walks the maze of America's fault lines. And in the stories these powerful essays present, we see ourselves." —Mike Ladd, musician, creator of Welcome to the After Future and co-composer for Netflix’s Transatlantic score

"With the lyricism of a poet, the penetrating discernment of a historian, and the keen social vision of an ethnographer, D. B. Maroon has delivered a set of essays that are stunning in their musicality and erudition in equal measure. This is anthropology of and for the future: an alchemical transmutation of the rage and grief that accompany the author’s unflinching explorations of anti-Black violence—from personal biography to COVID-era professional experiences to popular media discourse—into a call to love that is utterly convincing in its ferocity and scope. Black Lives, American Love is a book that everyone needs to read, to share, to teach." —Dr. Megan Moodie, author of We Were Adivasis

"Black Lives, American Love grips you with its powerful opening and holds with its urgent narrative. D. B. Maroon's personal stories complement her prolific reporting on American culture and its layered truths of racial inequality and the struggle for social justice. This book should be required reading for everyone who cares about the intersection of history and contemporary American life." —Sharrif Simmons, author of Clearly Spoken, Spoken Clearly: Sober Poems in a Drunk World

"D. B. Maroon’s honesty, like those of her generation, is brutal. She takes no shelter unveiling the mechanisms that keep Black and Brown lives in search of breath, of flight, of freedom. What we learn and carry in our blood, what we overcome as women, as Americans, D. B Maroon dissects, thus presenting a new talking 'fabric' aligned with her literary ancestors Hurston, Lorde, Morrison, and hooks. This book is a gift for the now and for generations long after us.  She is becoming the sun." —LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, author of Village and TwERK

"An eloquent and perceptive series of essays on Black lives in America" — Kirkus Reviews