mourning my inner [blackgirl] child

mourning my inner[blackgirl]child is an unabashed exposure of girlhood fragility, ancestral grieving, and embodied remembering. In her excavation of multiple pasts and multiple selves, reelaviolette botts-ward journeys through intimate encounters with her mother(s), her home, her body, and her precarity. As she mourns her deepest wounds, reelaviolette lays bare the im/possibilities of Black girlhood, slippages of Black motherhood, and matrilineal legacies of abuse. In telling her story, she tells so many of our own.

reelaviolette’s poetry invites Black women deeper into our healing and centers the little girl within herself who has a sacred word for the world.

dr. reelaviolette botts-ward, PhD, is a homegirl, an artist, and a nontraditional community curator from Philadelphia, PA. Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the REPAIR Project at UCSF, ree brings radical Black feminist healing arts to healthcare and medical science spaces. As founder of blackwomxnhealing, she curates healing circles, exhibitions, courses, and research for and by Black womxn, and values communal care as a foundational ethic for engaging somatic, ancestral, and spiritual wellness. She remains invested in making her academic work accessible to community audiences through her use of art, poetry, and digital humanities as tools for translation.

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