My Books

Contraband Marriage travels along the hemline of loving after incarceration, digging deep into its affects on that love, my walk into motherhood and how simple the decision to disentangle became when a child was involved. In multi-color, it paints the pains of the personal being political, the bumpy terrain of healing and the beautiful difficulty that can be forgiveness. It is a love story written in lyric and free form, set in reality with a different ever after.

Still Living on my Feet is the follow up to Tichaona Chinyelu’s first book, In the Whirlwind, which was rooted in a sense of hard-hitting revolutionary black love. However, in this sophomore effort, Tichaona brings the revolutionary essence from deep within the trough of her Y chromosomes; lacing it with truths, humor and sisterly compassion. Still uncompromising, Ms. Chinyelu overtly articulates the primacy of black women without negating their compliment, black men. Using a sentence she coined a while back; the line of my back needed straightening more than my hair, as her muse, Tichaona retraces the spiritual experience she had in her early twenties revolving around the grandmother she never met. Drawing on her desire to respond righteously, she encapsulated that experience of love and consciousness to produce the progressive, relevant and textured writings of Still Living on my Feet.

Join me as I weave words about the death of California and the path from Stevie to Sankara. Dig into the roots of Rwanda and explore the price of funerals. The history of blood is a whirlwind poetic tour that includes young black love and ends with the best of times.