Be Brave Be Bold
Dianca London Potts
Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in fiction from The New School. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a VONA Voices alumna, and the former online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. ...
In her bestselling collection Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman asks her audience, “Will we / forget, erase, censor, distort the experience as we live it, so / that it cannot be fully remembered? Or will we ask, carry, / keep, share, listen, truth-tell, so it need not be fully relived?” Within Gorman’s poetry and throughout the works featured on this list, the importance of sharing one’s truth takes center stage.
In a time of uncertainty, one thing is undeniable — the written word has the power to heal, uplift, and imagine. From Morgan Parker’s Who Put This Song On? and Mahogany L. Browne’s Vinyl Moon to the otherworldly battles in Ryan Douglass’s The Taking of Jake Livingston and Namina Forna’s The Gilded Ones, truth-telling is a form of Black survival, a testimony of resilience. Each of these stories is a reminder of the power of using your voice.