Literary Cleveland's celebrated reading series returns! To start off 2026, featured readers Cave Canem fellow Cherise Benton, Cleveland Arts Prize-winning poet Mary Weems, and local author Tara Pringle Jefferson will read from and discuss their work.
Register here.
A self-empowering wellness guide that celebrates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women. Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don't know where to begin.
Self-care isn't a trend among Black women; it has always been a throughline in our heritage. Consider Coretta Scott King, who along with fellow activists Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams, would enjoy "girls' trips" to take a break from the stress of the Civil Rights Movement. Remember their contemporary Rosa Parks attended (and led) yoga classes while on the front lines for Black rights in Detroit.
Think of the enduring friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, a sisterhood in which they have leaned on each other for nearly forty years while thriving in the glaring media and entertainment spotlight.
Picture Toni Morrison's overflowing gardens and lush houseplants she tended while writing classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye.
Recall Audre Lord's enduring declaration written after her second cancer diagnosis: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
Bloom How You Must explores and expands on this self-care legacy and shows how it can help every Black woman today.
Tara Pringle Jefferson excavates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women and transforms her findings into a blueprint women can follow in their daily lives. A blend of guidebook and journal, Bloom How You Must explores several distinct pillars of wellness, featuring:
- Research from leading wellness expertsInterviews with women aged 19-99Stories of personal experienceOverviews and explanations of each component of self-careDedicated pages for readers to reflect on each chapterExercises to put wellness into practiceEasy-to-follow explanatory graphics and sidebars
With its diversity of insights, practical skills and multigenerational focus, Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don't know where to begin. Bloom How You Must gives them the tools they need to improve their health and their daily lives.
A self-empowering wellness guide that celebrates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women. Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don't know where to begin.
Self-care isn't a trend among Black women; it has always been a throughline in our heritage. Consider Coretta Scott King, who along with fellow activists Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams, would enjoy "girls' trips" to take a break from the stress of the Civil Rights Movement. Remember their contemporary Rosa Parks attended (and led) yoga classes while on the front lines for Black rights in Detroit.
Think of the enduring friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, a sisterhood in which they have leaned on each other for nearly forty years while thriving in the glaring media and entertainment spotlight.
Picture Toni Morrison's overflowing gardens and lush houseplants she tended while writing classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye.
Recall Audre Lord's enduring declaration written after her second cancer diagnosis: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
Bloom How You Must explores and expands on this self-care legacy and shows how it can help every Black woman today.
Tara Pringle Jefferson excavates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women and transforms her findings into a blueprint women can follow in their daily lives. A blend of guidebook and journal, Bloom How You Must explores several distinct pillars of wellness, featuring:
- Research from leading wellness expertsInterviews with women aged 19-99Stories of personal experienceOverviews and explanations of each component of self-careDedicated pages for readers to reflect on each chapterExercises to put wellness into practiceEasy-to-follow explanatory graphics and sidebars
With its diversity of insights, practical skills and multigenerational focus, Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don't know where to begin. Bloom How You Must gives them the tools they need to improve their health and their daily lives.
A self-empowering wellness guide that celebrates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women. Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don't know where to begin.
Self-care isn't a trend among Black women; it has always been a throughline in our heritage. Consider Coretta Scott King, who along with fellow activists Betty Shabazz and Myrlie Evers-Williams, would enjoy "girls' trips" to take a break from the stress of the Civil Rights Movement. Remember their contemporary Rosa Parks attended (and led) yoga classes while on the front lines for Black rights in Detroit.
Think of the enduring friendship between Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, a sisterhood in which they have leaned on each other for nearly forty years while thriving in the glaring media and entertainment spotlight.
Picture Toni Morrison's overflowing gardens and lush houseplants she tended while writing classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye.
Recall Audre Lord's enduring declaration written after her second cancer diagnosis: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
Bloom How You Must explores and expands on this self-care legacy and shows how it can help every Black woman today.
Tara Pringle Jefferson excavates the roots of self-care and community care as a sustaining force for generations of Black women and transforms her findings into a blueprint women can follow in their daily lives. A blend of guidebook and journal, Bloom How You Must explores several distinct pillars of wellness, featuring:
- Research from leading wellness expertsInterviews with women aged 19-99Stories of personal experienceOverviews and explanations of each component of self-careDedicated pages for readers to reflect on each chapterExercises to put wellness into practiceEasy-to-follow explanatory graphics and sidebars
With its diversity of insights, practical skills and multigenerational focus, Bloom How You Must is a love letter to the millions of Black women who want a less stressful life but don't know where to begin. Bloom How You Must gives them the tools they need to improve their health and their daily lives.
In "Fall and Response" Mary Weems writes about Black life from a perspective filtered through a collective cultural lens which moves seamlessly from the personal of love, marriage, motherhood, suicide and loss to the political of poverty, mis-education, police violence...the daily effect of being Black, a woman and a descendant of slaves in a continually racist America which falsely promotes the idea of diversity and inclusion publicly, when what it wants is to conserve a status quo where the majority of Blacks remain on the bottom of the bottom one hundred and fifty-nine years after the official end of slavery.
In "Fall and Response" Mary Weems writes about Black life from a perspective filtered through a collective cultural lens which moves seamlessly from the personal of love, marriage, motherhood, suicide and loss to the political of poverty, mis-education, police violence...the daily effect of being Black, a woman and a descendant of slaves in a continually racist America which falsely promotes the idea of diversity and inclusion publicly, when what it wants is to conserve a status quo where the majority of Blacks remain on the bottom of the bottom one hundred and fifty-nine years after the official end of slavery.
In "Fall and Response" Mary Weems writes about Black life from a perspective filtered through a collective cultural lens which moves seamlessly from the personal of love, marriage, motherhood, suicide and loss to the political of poverty, mis-education, police violence...the daily effect of being Black, a woman and a descendant of slaves in a continually racist America which falsely promotes the idea of diversity and inclusion publicly, when what it wants is to conserve a status quo where the majority of Blacks remain on the bottom of the bottom one hundred and fifty-nine years after the official end of slavery.
