Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers Featuring Negesti Kaudo
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2022
Nylon: “Twelve Books by Black Authors We’re Excited about This Year”
“With unflinching honesty and vulnerability, Kaudo documents her journey to becoming her bolder self. … Kaudo is a highly self-aware work in progress who doesn’t have all the answers, but she has chosen the most interesting questions to grapple with. The result is a deeply intimate meditation on millennial Black womanhood and a righteous indictment of how this country treats Black girls and women. Timely, unapologetic, and intense, in all the best ways.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Ripe is a testament to the expansiveness of Black life—a very specific expansiveness that offers generous glimpses into Black womanhood, Black Midwesternness, Black place, and placelessness. This is a memorable book, an exploration written by a thoughtful and curious tour guide in the museum of her own life.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“A debut essay collection from an exciting new voice … joins the ranks of other recent collections on intersectionality such as Hood Feminism and Against White Feminism, a must-read contemporary canon.” —Eliza Smith, Lit Hub
“Emotional range without consequence,” Negesti Kaudo writes in her debut collection, Ripe, is a privilege of whiteness. In these essays, she fights back, exhorting readers to follow her through fury, grief, love, and hope as she confronts what it means to own her Blackness and her body in contemporary America. A scathing and nuanced cultural critic, she disentangles intersections of race, class, pop culture, size, sexuality, and more in spaces where she always seems to be either too Black or not Black enough. From attending private school as a poor Black student to the evolution of her hair routine to being fat and sexual when society says she should be neither, Kaudo overlooks nothing as she names the ways that white America simultaneously denigrates and steals Black culture. Most of all, she writes against the idea that a Black woman’s anger makes her an “angry Black woman,” claiming full emotional range as her birthright and as a tool against injustice on her quest to find herself no matter how uncomfortable the journey.
Negesti Kaudo is a Midwestern essayist who holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago and has worked as a copywriter, a sex toy columnist, and an adjunct writing instructor. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Ripe is her first book.
Photo Credit: Elson Photography
Contents
Acknowledgments
Marginalia
Rind
Ether
How to Steal a Culture
Kings, Queens, and Warriors
Unbothered: A Microaggression
D’Homme Americain: How to Emulate a White Man
A Liberated Black Beauty
Bodies of Water
Nine Minutes
Marginalia
Flesh
Black Girl Sabbath
Me, My Fat, and I
Thunder Thighs
Messy: Brief Notes on Body Positivity
The One Where My Femme Swallows You Whole
The One Where My Femme Has a Punch
The One Where My Femme Looks in the Mirror
The One Where My Femme Brings You Back to Life
The One Where My Femme Swells
Interlude: The Part Thugs Skip
For Your Pleasure
Marginalia
Seed
What Will Follow
Self-Portrait From the Coroner’s Table
Ripe
Contemplating God
Reclaiming a Name
Notes
