To Be Gone with Gone: Letters Between Primas
in Pandemic Time
by Ruth Nicole Brown and Sandra Ruiz
A co-publication of B1NARY Press and np:
5.5 x 8.5, 150 pgs., $23
ISBN 978-1-962365-20-8
Forthcoming in October 2026.
Written during the height of the pandemic, To Be Gone with Gone uses the epistolary format to offer vulnerable and improvised counter-rhythms as intentional kinship against the betrayals of Empire. Transcending traditional forms to cultivate different social gatherings from grief’s sacred geometries, Brown and Ruiz enact a “pan-demic sci fi” whereby experiences and energies morph and merge, and time becomes a new digital and analogic spatial re-encounter. Moving across and between live embodiments, and at other times apocalyptic fictions, these co-authors ask, what connections are made possible beyond given communications? And how do we intuitively, cosmically, and somatically catch the non-passive frequencies of institutional and social grief to feel, sense, and evolve with the unknown? To navigate the space where sorrow becomes courage and friendship re-defines living, these letters extend a shared vocabulary of tender vulnerability, biting humor, and fierce determination, lifting us all into the spiritual and earthly realities of primahood.
Ruth Nicole Brown is at her best when disciplinary norms are disrupted in favor of creating ideas that swing. Brown’s work is rooted in the celebration of Black girlhood via Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective space Brown found in 2006 that continues to be her most cherished and consistent practice of meeting Black girls face to face and heart to heart. Author of Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward A Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy (Peter Lang, 2009), Brown has also co-edited several anthologies, Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry: Possibilities and Tensions in Educational Research with R. Carducci and C. Kuby (Peter Lang, 2014) and Wish To Live: The Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader with C. Kwaye (Peter Lang, 2012). Currently, Brown is the MSU Research Foundation Professor and Inaugural Chairperson of the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University.
Sandra Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, Left Turns In Brown Study, and Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor. An avid collaborator, Ruiz is co-author with Hypatia Vourloumis of Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World and The Alleys: Just Dropped in to See What Condition my Condition was In, and co-editor with Uri McMillan and Shane Vogel of the NYU Book Series Minoritarian Aesthetics. Additionally, Ruiz is the producer and creative director of the Minor Aesthetics Lab. Currently, Ruiz serves as the Sue Divan Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre at UIUC and directs the undergrad and graduate minors in Minoritarian Aesthetics.