The Creative Healing
Growing up, I received racialized messages about myself and others. We all did. As a creative and a writer, I use words to engage your imagination and speak to your heart to interrupt the messages that compromise your humanity. Why? My life and expertise have taught me that antiracism is more than understanding vocabulary and concepts. It is also healing work. I invite you to imagine the healing, to see past the dis-ease to a place of wholeness where possibilities yet live for us all.
Books by Anika Nailah
Every Day in the USA: 30 Black Moments
by Anika Nailah (Illustrations by C. Andrew Williams)
Does your life as an African American in the USA seem a bit insane? Are you asking yourself questions and having racial encounters every day about which white folks have no clue? This book lets you know that you’re neither crazy nor alone. In addition, if you’re a white person seeking to show up as an accomplice to African Americans, you’ll gain precious clues as you witness real-life scenarios you may otherwise have never known.
In the tradition of Langston Hughes’ final work, Black Misery, author/cultural liberationist, Anika Nailah, shares 30 common moments in 21st Century Black American life. C. Andrew Williams’ humorous yet poignant black and white illustrations enhance those scenarios to create the Everyday in the USA: 30 Black Moments experience of an undisguised portrayal of life in Black America.
The unapologetic, intimate, and ironic tone will feel familiar to African Americans, while quite eye-opening to white readers, perfectly serving as a catalyst to spearhead thoughtful cross-racial and African American community conversations.
The Ready to Go Deeper Anti-Racism Guide at the back of the book also provides 31 activities for using the book to help you not only examine individually, in workplaces, in neighborhoods, and other group settings, crucial and urgent questions about racial oppression, but offers concrete steps you can take to turn reflection into active interruption of racism in the United States of America.
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Please contact the author directly through this site for discounted copies.
What People Are Saying
“Offering astutely layered entry points to understanding the daily indignities people of color endure in America, so often at the hands of well-intended but oblivious white people. This is an indispensable tool for workshops, book groups, and coffee tables.”
— Robin DiAngelo, PhD
Author of the NYT Best-Selling Book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism
— Priya Vulchi & Winona Guo
Authors of Tell Me Who You Are
— Serin Houston, PhD
College Professor of Geography and International Relations
Free & Other Stories
by Anika Nailah
In spare, elegant stories reminiscent of the writings of Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West, Anika Nailah illuminates the emotional, spiritual, and social realities that shape–and sometimes destroy–the lives and dreams of ordinary African Americans.
The stories in Free offer a moving, strikingly original perspective on how cultural experiences and social assumptions impact our lives. The characters include young children trying to cope with the mysteries of adult behavior, adults striving to define themselves in a society unwilling to accept who and what they are, and elderly people looking back on the often difficult choices they have made. They all share a yearning to be free of the ties imposed by others, ties that bind their bodies, minds, or spirits.
In probing the interior landscapes behind the everyday faces her characters assume, Anika Nailah brilliantly exposes the injustices and struggles African Americans confront, the skills they develop in order to survive, and the psychological and spiritual costs of survival.
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What People Are Saying
“Nailah’s prose is simple without being simplistic, and while her characters’ experiences are shaped by their color, their responses are irrepressibly human.”
— Boston Magazine
— Brian Keith Jackson
Author of The Queen of Harlem
— Publisher’s Weekly
The National Liberation Poetry Tour Experience
by Anika Nailah
Whether you’ve seen Anika perform or not, this book is for you if you want to do more than just think about eradicating racism in America. It’s an empowering poetry collection, an anti-racism workbook, and a social justice resource. She is taking the country by a storm of the heart.
If you have already taken part in the Tour Experience, you can:
- read the poems from the show, and
- process all of the thoughts and emotions that came up for you during and after.
As an added bonus, the book also has space to create your own liberation poetry or other liberation creations.