Alexis De Veaux is wholly unique and prone to stunning the breath out of my system. I knew this before we ever met, reading her text Yabo. I knew this watching her enter a room where Jewelle Gomez was offering a brilliant interpretation of James Baldwin on the stage in front of us, and yet Alexis, at the front of the audience, was the force of gravity for the room’s attention. I knew this the first time I entered her home, which feels like the spirit of Mardi Gras and Alice in Wonderland and Mickalene Thomas co-created the best ritual library of all time. I know this every time I find myself in conversation with Alexis, that she wants the highest quality breath I can offer, the deepest-rooted thinking any of us can offer.

In the summer of 2020, I was watching a plenary from the Allied Media Conference, broadcast on my parents’ TV. COVID-19 revealed to me that I hadn’t spent enough time with my parents, so I went to them, quarantined, and stayed for four months. I learned that I would never get enough time with them as long as I live but that I could make the time we had together more sacred, more present. Alexis helped me see that.

The panel was called Writing the Future, and it featured Alexis De Veaux in conversation with my beloved comrades and collaborators Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Walidah Imarisha.

I wrote down the things Alexis De Veaux was saying, because they felt like instruction and permission:

“I have to create first and live inside of that. I have to not judge what comes through.”

“I am not just writing against whiteness, homophobia, ableism … but with every

project I am asking myself what am I writing towards? Am I creating Black shamanic texts? Is it sonic, heard, vibrational, disturbing the air?”

And then she said that what she was currently writing was called afiction, something that was coming through her that was not built as a linear story of generated characters but as a revealed poetics of gathered and ever-changing spirit. I knew what she meant in my bones, and I needed it—I asked if I could help get it into the world through our small and mighty series at AK Press.

With the Emergent Strategy Series, we are interested in provocation, in offering up new lenses, frameworks, and forms through which humans can see where we are and what we need to attend to; stories that tell the truth, theories that can be practiced in current time. We need new genre and post-genre work that blurs the line of collaboration with spirit.

Alexis was generous with us, and if I’m honest I thought perhaps she was just indulging me as an eager fan-reader. As she sent me the JesusDevil parables she had written to that point, I read them immediately and asked for more. I felt like I had won a literary lottery for my soul. What I got to read, what you are about to read, is a text that I believe will take its place in Black feminist classic creative literature alongside Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide … When the Rainbow is Enuf, with the spirit mystery of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And—it is unlike any of these, or anything else I’ve ever read.

Reader, this text is to be felt as much as read. You will have to trust your intuition and release your assumptions. The character-spirits will slip off the page and into the world around you, seduce you, shock you, open you up, change you—and you will miss them after, trust me. The poetic form of this storytelling will guide you through transgression, wonderment, and pleasure, but the destination will in part be your own.

I am beyond honored that Alexis De Veaux trusted Emergent Strategy with this sky-shaking work. Turn the page and give her your breath.

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