Soul Survivors
by LeConté Dill
5.5 x 8.5, 112 pgs., $22
ISBN 978-1-962365-12-3
Order copies here.
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“When LeConté Dill writes: 'I got it in my blood, Blood' it is a proper invitation to The Town, Oakland to be exact. Home of these poems, and this Here, Here and redaction of names because Dill knows what it means to be redacted. This is the take back of vernacular and people power. These poems got the fire of BPP breakfasts and Hella nods at the lyrical canopies that make the Bay Area a living archive, no matter the gentrification dressing. Dill utilizes the mixed media and lyrical dexterity of a California funk song to heal the most distant reader. This collection be a sweet and sticky melodic journey.”
–Mahogany L. Browne, poet​, writer, curator, organizer, author of Chrome Valley and Vinyl Moon, among others, and the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center
“In Soul Survivors, LeConté Dill captures the tonal and vernacular essence of Black girls’ tongues so beautifully. Her careful research and writing are a brilliant crafting of the knowingness of Black girls. The poetry collection will surely evoke glorious 'well now' and 'tell it' reactions from audiences. In the three distinctive sections, Dill demonstrates a profound understanding of Black girlhood in America, especially how Black teen girls navigate multiple places and spaces. Her three 'fictionalized speakers' are brave enough to critique systems that seek to displace and surveil them, all while loving on family, friends, and their blocks. Soul Survivors is a timely treasure.”
–Marta Effinger-Crichlow, PhD, mother of a Black girl, Director of Little Sallie Walker, and author of Staging Migrations Toward an American West
“Beginning with a reminder that black people are still 'Here Here,' LeConté Dill takes the reader on a journey honoring Black communities and celebrating Black girlhood. The poems traverse generations and locations, yet are connected by threads of family and kinship, joy and pain, and surviving and thriving. Dill’s work embodies the tradition of black poetic storytelling as her use of language and lyrical complexity are a conjuring and an offering to the communities black people had, have, and will (continue to) build. Soul Survivors is a black love collection. It is a creative resistance collection that beautifully demonstrates Black love is indeed Black wealth. It is the book of poems we need.”
–Qiana Cutts Givens, PhD, poet, playwright, educator, and Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at Mississippi State University
Soul Survivors consists of three sections of persona poems where each storyteller introduces themselves—their neighborhoods, families, friends, activities, thoughts, and feelings—speaking to whomever can and will listen. LaChelle hails from East Oakland, CA, April is from the Pittsburgh neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta, GA, and Naima was born and raised in East Flatbush Brooklyn, NY. These girls’ communities and lives have been shaped by political, economic, and social changes to their neighborhoods and schools and by personal and community practices of hope and healing. The fictionalized speakers are all teenagers, yet the book implores adult readers to mentally and emotionally explore this real-life complex navigation along with the characters.
Informed by fifteen years of the author’s ethnographic research in and with these neighborhoods and the young people and community organizations there, the girls’ poetic voices and verses in Soul Survivors offer more than what traditional research, programming, policy, and media reports can hold. The book interrogates the research literature on adolescent resilience, including the author’s own, because for urban Black girls, resilience is not a goal, but a given. Therefore, Soul Survivors re-presents what strategies Black girls, and their villages, are enacting on a daily basis beyond resilience and beyond survival.
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LeConté Dill is the author of Building a Maker Outta Me (Third World Press, forthcoming). She was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California, the eldest grandchild of four sojourners of the Second Wave of the Great Migration. She is a storyteller, artist, educator, and community-accountable scholar. LeConté is a proud Spelman alumna and holds graduate degrees from UCLA and UC Berkeley. LeConté currently guides, creates, and learns with students, fellow faculty, and community members as the Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her work is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community organizers, policy advocates, and health educators at community-based organizations and public health departments across the U.S. and South Africa. In her research, art, teaching, and advocacy, she aims to listen to and show up for Black girls, in particular, and is committed to documenting their/our strategies of wellness, healing, and resistance. Her writing has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as POETRY, the Du Bois Review, Feminist Anthropology, Mom Egg Review, and Health Promotion Practice.