In their new book, “Black Futures,” Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew take on the question of what it means to be Black and alive now. They chronicle this shared experience through over 500 expansive pages. It features art, essays, stories, interviews and even memes by Black creators from around the world. The book’s contributors are equally comprehensive, and include heavyweights like Solange Knowles, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kiese Laymon.
The book’s introduction was excerpted in The New York Times:
Blackness is infinite— a single book cannot attempt to contain the multitudes and multiverse. This is just one manifestation of a project that spans millennia. We are in a continuum of those who came before and those who will come after and make a dent in the archival project that is required of us as humans on this planet. We strove to nod to those we admire who are making history, and those taking history and doing something anew with it. We aimed for a perspective that was global, atemporal, not dominated by America and the West, not constructed by binaries, and as dynamic as possible for a print book.
We talk to Drew and Wortham and with you about “Black Futures” and what we might see when we look beyond this book.
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