Author: Nicole Shawan Junior

Nicole Shawan Junior was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of beautiful inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. She is a black, queer and poverty-born counter-storyteller, felon and former police prosecutor. Nicole’s work appears in ZORA, SLICE, The Feminist Wire, Gay Mag, and elsewhere. She’s a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence and has received fellowships from NYFA, SAFTA, Esalen, and more. Nicole is the Executive Director of Roots. Wounds. Words.: A Literary Arts Revolution, Editor-in-Chief of Black Femme Collective, has guest edited for The Rumpus, and curates a column penned by justice-involved women for Raising Mothers: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about her at NicoleShawanJunior.com.

Keep Your Bible: I Found My Queerness in Black Religion (Part III) Embodiment

He was younger than I expected, younger than our email correspondence had suggested. His pale skin still wore its youth. His round shoulders carried a much older weight. “Nicole, right? Come on in,” he urged after I climbed two sets of stairs and passed through marijuana plumes that smoked within the building’s stairwell. Crossing the […]

Keep Your Bible: I Found My Queerness In Black Religion (Part II) Remembrance

The Yoruba tribe is one of the three largest ethnic groups in present-day Southwestern Nigeria. Smaller, scattered groups of the tribe live in Benin and northern Togo. Together, these areas comprise Yorubaland. Yorubaland was one of the biggest slave-exporting regions in Africa. European colonizers enslaved Yoruba tribespeople and distributed them throughout the Atlantic world. This […]

Keep Your Bible: I Found My Queerness in Black Religion (Part I) Initiation

I floated alone. The sun’s Jesus piece gold sliced through the ocean’s mild oscillations. Glancing around, chin crossing over chest to shade one shoulder before the next, I surveyed the unfamiliar expanse. My face soaked up the luminary’s warmth, like bee suckling nectar. Though neither landmass nor sign of human life, neither boat nor waterworn […]