October NYU, Department of Policy Studies
November 29th 2023. The Poetry Project, New York. 8 – 9.30pm
December 3rd 2023. The GreenWay Reading Series, Takoma Park. 5-7pm
January 26th 2024. Making Worlds Bookstore, Philadelphia. 6pm
A brilliantly crafted voyage of queer, Black possibility.
“[Alexis] said that what she was currently writing was called afiction, something that was coming through her that was not built as a linear story of generated characters, but as a revealed poetics of gathered and ever-changing spirit.… As she sent me the JesusDevil parables she had written to that point, I read them immediately and asked for more. I felt like I had won a literary lottery for my soul. What I got to read, what you are about to read, is a text that I believe will take its place in Black feminist classic creative literature alongside Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide…When the Rainbow is Enuf, with the spirit mystery of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And—it is unlike any of these, or anything else I’ve ever read.” —adrienne maree brown, from the foreword
Evocative and experimental, JesusDevil is a nonlinear tale of black life and spiritual expression. Writing in a style she calls “afiction,” Alexis De Veaux expands and moves beyond traditional narrative, following the adventures of Fhill, a black, queer spirit who has taken human form. Neither male nor female, Fhill moves fluidly and disruptively across concepts of identity, passing through the nine “parables” that comprise this text. Examining aspects of what it means to be black and human—from a nonhuman perspective—Fhill’s liminal nature redefines social and literary categories, exploring social constructions of blackness as well as themes of desire, memory, sex, revenge, and more. A daring new work and crowning achievement from a veteran storyteller.” `“Alexis De Veaux is wholly unique and prone to stunning the breath out of my system….. Forward by adrienne maree brown
PRAISE FOR JESUSDEVIL, THE PARABLES
“In this timely work, Alexis weaves through and beyond the many ways that a parable can live. She speaks of viruses, sheltering in and folks losing their sense of taste in stories where the dead rise, slay, shake themselves loose and rumble us with their sexy. In this afiction, ancient beings from the future take us down and up roads that can only be detailed in a structure that defies naming. Once again, Alexis has written a book of holy queer, new possibilities. Get ready to open, pause, and wonder.”
—Sharon Bridgforth, author of 2003 Lambda Literary Finalist love conjure/blues and recipient of a 2022 Windham Campbell Prize in Drama
“Our ancestral past, present, and future share a concentric relationship in De Veaux’s prophetic, JesusDevil: The Parables. In these after (other) worlds, Black life is autopoietic. Black life recreates, reproduces, and changes shape, sound, and color. JesusDevil arranges and makes meaning and rhythm through erotic exercise and language. These articulations of the sacred are not about orthodox practice; they are “black sermonic text” of the quotidian, an aesthetic of the ordinary. The body, as De Veaux poeticizes, expands language and biology. The bodypussys both itself and other, the body is self and other. De Veaux’s nine parables are vestibules of possibility and proof that the imagination is the genesis of promise.”
—Briona S. Jones, editor of 2021 Lambda Literary Award Winner Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
“In this utterly authentic, deftly crafted, and creatively courageous book, Alexis De Veaux illustrates how the apex of form, style, and matter are more than the tools to document and journey through individual and collective memory; rather, this trinity of craft must, can, has been and will be reimagined in the ritual of storytelling as a portal of constant creation, not simply a tale told simply to arrive someplace and settle. When Fhill, De Veaux’s central character, says she wants “a big life-changing prize or honor that recognizes all we been through over time,” I thought immediately that JesusDevil: The Parables is that prize. It generously invites readers into a dogged literacy, a rigorous reading practice so that we might be fully awash in the complexity of life in spirit, and spirit in life, presented in all its honesty, love, humor, desire, pleasure, pain, and grace. JesusDevil: The Parables is the fulcrum upon which ancestral listening as a technology of writing otherwise, manifests as both possibility and practice. It is a gift to have this book in this time, and now, for all times.”
—Eric Darnell Pritchard, author of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy
JesusDevil, the Parables is due for publication in June 12th, 2023 and can be preordered through the publishers, AK Press.
Alexis De Veaux’s papers are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York and the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans.
Photo: 2018 Copyright Sokari Ekine
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has Ms De Veaux’s papers covering the period 1970s, 1980s and 1990s including notebooks, plays, poetry, manuscripts and drafts, photos, memorabilia, VHS and audio tapes, and correspondence.
The Amistad Research Center has additional papers from 1967 to 2016. The archives mainly consist of correspondence, drafts of original manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera documenting her professional life and work. Correspondence within the collection is professional in nature covering De Veaux’s many speaking and lecturing engagements, publishing, her work as the chair of the Women’s Department at the University of Buffalo, and her work as a graduate student in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The papers are rich in original drafts and notebooks of De Veaux poetry, novels, and biographies including Yabo, The Unbreakable Threat, and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. De Veaux’s thesis, This Far by Faith: A Writer’s Autobiography (1989) and Dissertation, Concealed Weapons: Contemporary Black Women’s Short Stories as Agent’s for Social Change, 1960s to the Present (undated) can be found within the collection. Additionally, her published work, Blue Heat: A Portfolio of Poems and Drawings(1985) is available.
The papers also document De Veaux’s teaching life and work as the chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Buffalo, and other institutions through notebooks on teaching, correspondence, student papers and poetry, as well as ephemeral materials such as flyers, posters, programs, and news clippings.
There is a small amount of material in the form of cards, letters, and mementos generated from De Veaux’s long-term relationship with Loyce Stewart, Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity and Affirmative Action Administration.
Of note are conference materials and photographs of the International Women’s Playwrights Conference at the University of Buffalo (circa1990) and the Black Women Writer & the Diaspora Conference in Michigan (1985). Additional photographs are mainly personal, documenting events, such as her book tour in Japan in 1998, Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 and De Veaux’s travels in Africa, and various events held by the Women’s Studies Department at UB including poet, Paula Gunn Allen’s visit in 1990. Also of note are compact disks for Warrior Poet produced by Out-FM on WBAI 99.5 FM Radio in New York and audiocassettes Black Box 11and Black Box 17, readings by black poets and produced by The New Classroom in Washington, D.C. (undated). Lastly, slides and programs are available for An Evidence of Letters, Alexis De Veaux and Renée Armstrong at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in 200.
Congratulations to this year’s recipient of The Society of AfroFuture Visionaries in They Own Category, Ola Osifo Osaze. Ola is a trans masculine queer of Edo and Yoruba descent. Ola is the “National Organizer for the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project and has been a community organizer for many years, including working with Transgender Law Center, the Audre Lorde Project, Uhuru Wazobia (one of the first LGBT groups for African immigrants in the US), Queers for Economic Justice and Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Ola is a 2015 Voices of Our Nation Arts workshop (VONA) fellow, and has writings published in Apogee, Qzine, Black Girl Dangerous, Black Looks, and the anthologies Queer African Reader and Queer Africa II.”
Alexis De Veaux and Sokari Ekine, January 2019