Soulwork started as a question I asked myself as I was crashing out silently in a workplace storage room: how can I do the work my soul must have1, given the racism and sexism that have always shaped my Black ass life? Sitting with that question led to several years of research and the creation of an entire epistemological framework on how we can assess Black peoples relationships with work, labor, and vocation2.
The Womanist Reader is where that practice extends to the page as we read multiple genres of texts through the lenses of both womanism and Soulwork.
I created this space because we are living through a manufactured literacy crisis, a labor market being hollowed out from underneath us, and a definitive era of political and cultural retrenchment. Protecting the archive of Black feminist and womanist thought cannot be left exclusively to an academy that too often gates it off from the people who need it most. As a scholar working outside those walls, I believe part of the work my soul must have is translating what our foremothers left us in relevant, timely ways so the information stay sharp, accessible, and alive.
What Soulwork Is, Briefly
Soulwork is a Black radical womanist framework built around five pillars: Vocation, Wisdom, Community, Advocacy, and Self-Care. It names what meaningful work actually requires inside a system built on racialized and gendered extraction—and what it costs Black women, girls, and those who read as such (regardless of their actual gender identity) to do that work and try to remain whole.
Reading, in this framework, is the labor that builds the wisdom and vocation pillars directly, while feeding community, advocacy, and self-care along the way. The books we dissect here are meant to help everyone look straight at the actual conditions Black women live and work inside, grapple with what those conditions mean for their own flourishing, and use that info to figure out how to move.
How a Text Gets Chosen
Every text we read here will meet a few honest criteria, in no particular order:
All genres matter. I am intentionally using the word “text” as often as possible. Though the vast majority of what gets consumed here will be books (both fiction and non fiction). There will also be transcripts of speeches and sermons. Articles and essays. Blog posts and viral social media threads. Poems and screenplays and song lyrics. If there are words involved, I consider it up for analysis.
It has to sit inside or near the frame. And I'm honestly making the connections up as I go. We're talking about how Black people of marginalized genders are depicted in media, the Great Migration, US labor history, mother-daughter and father-daughter dynamics, love, sex, and sex work, alongside literary theory, the Black women's club movement, Black feminist thought, and Afrofuturism.
Not every Black woman writer's work qualifies just because of who wrote it, and not every text here is going to be written by a Black woman. Judith Butler is still worth reading, and so is James Baldwin. Some people we will read just because we disagree, but need to be absolutely sure about why. The only rule is that the text itself has to be doing something relevant to this specific lens, and we gotta read it like a womanist.
It has to invite rhetorical and literary critique. Any text that isn't AI slop can technically be read closely, but the deep dives here are doing specific labor: we are looking at how the texts build their argument, where the argument holds, where it snaps, and what it leaves behind when we're done picking it apart. I’m intentionally making it “that deep”. Because it is.
It has to connect to something I'm already sitting with. I'm an autotheorist, and that means lived experience, historical analysis, and praxis all happen on the same register in my world. If a text doesn't talk to my own work in some way, it doesn't end up here, no matter how good it is.
It has to serve the archive over the algorithm. I am not building content for an algorithm, and I won't be pressed or pressured into trends that sit outside the frame. At the same time, I have ADHD, so I’m legit hardwired to go where the wind blows. It's entirely natural for this project to be pulled in unexpected directions by the material itself, as long as it stays true to the work.
How We Actually Read the Texts
Nothing here is timed to a launch calendar or an algorithm. Once a text is chosen, the pace is timed to the work actually being done (which is slower, most of the time, than any of us would probably like). That's on purpose too.
Some texts take a couple of weeks; others take a couple of months. Regardless of duration, the arc will look like this:
The Announcement & The Guide: We open with why. Why this text, why now, and what I'm hoping to find in it. This is where we drop into the context of the work and the author, and maybe nerd out just a little bit about the cover art. It’s everything you need to know before we go into the pages together. Paid subscribers also get the annotated reading guide right out of the gate.
The Weekly Dispatches: As we work through the text, all subscribers can expect a weekly dispatch of close-read essays bringing the Soulwork lens to bear directly on the material. Depending on the density of the book, there might be multiple deep-dive essays before we reach the end.
The Close: We wrap up the text with a community conversation, exclusively for paid subscribers. Because reading alone and reading in community are two different practices, and this one is meant to be both.
Why This Matters
There is a version of Black women's reading culture online that flattens everything into inspirational quotes, aesthetic bookshelves, and zero friction. That’s not what we're doing here.
This space exists as a direct intervention against the conditions we navigate daily. We are building an active, intergenerational archive against a manufactured literacy and labor crisis.
In a world that demands hyper-productivity and constant output, choosing to sit with an uncomfortable text for weeks on end is a radical act of refusal. Reading and critical thought still matter, and protecting your capacity for deep thought is non-negotiable. We are here to interrogate what these texts mean, and how they help us survive, organize, and remain whole inside a system built on extraction.
The texts that show up here are going to ask something of you, the way they asked something of me. Attending to that friction is doing soulwork.
So that's how we read here.
Slowly. Deliberately. Black-ily. And through a lens that doesn't apologize for taking itself seriously.
This work is a labor of love and a lot of late nights in the archives. If you see value in the curation of the archive, you can Buy Me A Book here.
1 Katie Geneva Cannon is noted for this phrase. It is the terminology that launched me on the path of this work. I came across it by way of fourth wave womanist theologian EbonyJanice.
2 None of which are the same thing. Soulwork’s core premise is that work is all labor under capitalism, and as such, all work is inherently based in racialized and gendered exploitation. Labor, on the other hand, is any effort expended in service of a goal. Labor can be liberatory or exploitative, dependent upon the circumstances under which it is performed. Vocation in this lens, is labor performed (inside or outside of formal capitalistic structures) that make one more free.