Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors

About the Book

Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors is a provocative, tender, literary collection of essays, poetry, and graphic stories about how racism shapes life in the urban outdoors. African American writers ages 16 to 74 share their memories of summertime in Detroit. In these pages, water is both a spiritual divide between enslavement and freedom, and a segregated space for whites only. Public spaces hold both enticement and threat; summer road trips are as necessary as they are guarded. While the stories are uniquely Detroit, they are also emblematic of the barriers to the outdoors imposed upon Black and brown urban dwellers nationwide since The Great Migration. Persistent themes color their stories: How racism circumscribes Black outdoor participation. How divestment, abandonment, and racial politics continue to redline childhood summers. How childhood racial trauma still haunts the adults who survived it. Black Summers is a collection about struggle, persistence, and reinvention. But ultimately, it’s a tribute to Black joy during the most carefree of seasons: summertime.

**We encourage in-person attendees to wear masks in the event space during the program for the health and well-being of the speaker and other guests. We will have a reception afterward the program with light refreshments and books available for purchase.**

Speakers:

Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, former attorney, and editor of the groundbreaking 2026 anthology, Black Summers: Growing up in the Urban Outdoors. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oprah Daily, MSNBC Daily, Flash FictionAmerica 2023, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, River Teeth, Best African American Fiction 2010, and noted in The Best American Essays 2019. Cooper’s children’s picture book, Nothing Special, is a 2023 Paterson Prizewinner and included on the NY Public Library’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2022.” She is a founding board member of Cave Canem, a residency for Black poets; a former board member of the Furious Flower Poetry Center; a current member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective; and a fellow of Kimbilio, a residency for Black fiction writers. http://www.desireecooper.com

MARS. Marshall was born and raised in Detroit, MI. MARS. is a writer, film photographer, and the author of FLOWER BOI (Gold Line Press, 2022). They earned an MSW from Wayne State University and an MFA from Randolph College. Their work has appeared in Four Way Review, Obsidian Literature & Arts for the African Diaspora, Foglifter, and elsewhere. MARS. is the recipient of the 2021 Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Arts Fellowship and the 2019 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Fellowship in Poetry. They currently live and love in Chicago. http://www.blkboimars.com

J K Chukwu is a writer and visual artist from the Midwest. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. She was a LAMBDA fellow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and short-listed for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unfortunates, published with Mariner Books, was a co-winner for the 2024 MMLA prize. It was also featured in the New York Times Book Review, Ebony, Bustle, and selected as a Buzz Pick with Good Morning America.