Black. Single. Mother.: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging - Hardcover

by Jamilah LeMieux (Author)

A personal meditation on, examination of, and tribute to Black single motherhood, unapologetically told through poignant essays and candid interviews by a celebrated cultural critic

"Jamilah Lemieux is one of the most important feminist writers of the twenty-first century."--Brittney Cooper

With her signature candid, humorous, and sometimes biting takes, Jamilah Lemieux suffers no fools while also courageously revealing the scars of her own parenting journey and search for self-acceptance in a world that hates "baby mamas." With a particular verve and relatability--honed in her many years among Black Twitter's most prominent voices--Lemieux centers the complex reality of Black single motherhood: uncertainty and fierceness alike.

Black. Single. Mother. combines riveting personal essays, infused with whip-smart cultural and historical analysis, with twenty-one intimate first-person testimonies from a spectrum of Black single mothers. A long-overdue offering in celebration of the American matriarch most often maligned, Black. Single. Mother. sets out to inspire a new cultural and community dialogue about this powerful figure as one profoundly deserving of love, support, and respect.

Author Biography

Jamilah Lemieux is a cultural critic and writer with a focus on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. A leading feminist thinker, social influencer, and millennial media darling, Lemieux has written for a host of platforms, including the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Essence, Playboy, The Cut, The Guardian, Colorlines, The Washington Post, Wired, Self, Refinery29, and The New York Times. She was prominently featured in Lifetime's docuseries Surviving R. Kelly and Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning. She also appeared in A&E's Secrets of Playboy. Lemieux penned the forewords for the anniversary editions of Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and Ann Petry's Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Currently, she writes a weekly advice column for Slate's "Care and Feeding" parenting section. She resides in Los Angeles with her daughter, Naima.