Soul Survivors

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, California, April is from the Pittsburgh neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta, GA, and Naima was born and raised in East Flatbush Brooklyn, New York. 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.