FOUNDED

IN1997

Detroit Poet Laureate jessicaCare moore, has relaunched as an imprint of Amistad/HarperCollins, celebrating its first publication: Every Where Alien by poet Brad Walrond. Now co-run by moore and Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency, MBP is committed to publishing revolutionary works by leading and emerging Black voices in poetry and the performing arts.

MOORE BLACK PRESS

jessica Care moore

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Brad Walrond

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Barbara Fant

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jessica Care moore 〰️ Brad Walrond 〰️ Barbara Fant 〰️

AVAILABLE NOW

BARBARA FANT

Barbara Fant has been writing and performing for over 15 years. She competed in 9 National Poetry Slam competitions, and she is a World Poetry Slam finalist. She is the author of two poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, McNeese Review, The Ohio State University Press, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, amongst others. She has received residencies in Havana, Cuba and Senegal, West Africa.

BRAD WALROND

Brad’s poetics, performance, and multi-disciplinary work interpolate between virtual reality, identity formation, and human consciousness at the intersection of race, gender, sex, and desire.  By amplifying and interrogating the great power and contractions inherent to identity, Brad aims with his work to provoke futurist explorations of how we co-create historical, remembered, and imagined time. The urgency that suffuses his work asks how we can cultivate habitable futures worthy of the common threads of our human inheritance. Walrond’s debut collection, Every Where Alien, focuses on the author’s own Black queer exploration of the world, and how these experiences map onto the discovery of co-occurring art and resistance movements among New York City’s underground communities—communities like the New Black Arts Movement, the New York House Ballroom Scene, Black Rock Coalition, Underground house dance and music community, and the Black queer political arts and activist movements that arose in response to the ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

jessica Care moore

JESSICA CARE MOORE IS ONE OF THE LEADING VOICES OF HER GENERATION. AN AWARD-WINNING POET, RECORDING ARTIST, BOOK PUBLISHER, ACTIVIST, CULTURAL ARTS CURATOR, AND FILMMAKER, SHE IS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER AND FOUNDER OF BLACK WOMEN ROCK! - DAUGHTERS OF BETTY, A 20-YEAR-OLD ROCK & ROLL INSTITUTION, CONCERT AND EMPOWERMENT WEEKEND, AND SHE IS THE FOUNDER OF THE LITERACY DRIVEN 501C3, THE MOORE ART HOUSE. HER NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION IN DETROIT DEDICATED TO ELEVATING LITERACY THROUGH THE ARTS IN NEIGHBORHOODS AND SCHOOLS.

PRESS

  • "Some art will sit you down and make you look at your own beautiful self, force you to recognize it and find joy, the same kind you don't think you deserve. Or deserve right now. Joy in the Belly of a Riot cradles your face gently, and with its plutonic lips to your mouth, will tug up from you a response. If not your words, then your body, hoisted by a chain of inspired verbs till you're no longer nonverbal. That is Fant's power on the page, the kind that raises bodies."

    Natashia Deón, author of the critically acclaimed novels The Perishing and Grace

  • Barbara Fant’s deep reflections on grief and injustice contain a certain romanticism, but it is always reigned in by a pragmatic interrogation of what those beasts have done to Black life. Not even God escapes her emotional scalpel, and her cuts are deep, but not without light or love. For every shadow there is an ecstatic reckoning around the corner. Hers is a protest made of solemn magic and that conjures a better world whether it wishes to be one or not.

    Scott Woods, author of Black Night is Falling

  • Barbara Fant gives testimony and a blueprint for surviving. Fant revives the people with her poetry and studies each line, like one might study love. With true tenderness, she scribes liberatory practices and prayers; affirmations and songs, a healing song for us wearied by journey. A salve for the numb. Here are the poems we didn't know we needed, they give birth to bravery and give us space to "find the strength to fly".

    Mahogany L. Browne

  • Barbara Fant’s poems are smoldering affirmations. They singe first! Much like the tactile force in Ntozake Shange and Maya Angelou’s works, Fant’s text arrives always in service to the withering truth. The bounty of healing Joy in the Belly of a Riot accomplishes, takes trauma's inferno head on, and clears brush to the altars of soul work and self-forgiveness. Barbara Fant’s urgent and essential ministry of poems reminds us joy must be a choosing. Joy In the Belly of a Riot shows us how the bruised may accept mercy, how survivors and community can enact grace.

    —Brad Walrond, author of Every Where Alien

THE CLASSICS