The body is a wild thing. My body sat me down, told me to slow down, took me into naps, chats with trees and reflection by the ocean. If you’ve ever experienced any version of shingles, then you know what the last few weeks have been like. I was lucky to have a support system (and health care) and I am happy to share more about the experience at some point when it isn’t so fresh and painful. Get your shingles vaccine if you can.
All I will say for now is thank you all for your patience! I’m excited to get the coffee going here at the Kitchen Table again. Just in time for a raucous new year.
Which begins with good news!!
I am thrilled to share that while I was sleeping, preorders went live for my next book, The Light Keepers: Black Women, History, and the Long Fight Against Empire, out with W. W. Norton next February.
An award-winning young scholar explores how Black women have remade—and continue to remake—our understanding of the past.
Across centuries, Black women have invented means to preserve what official history could not: friendship albums, kitchen-table philosophy, blogs, playlists, oral histories, and archives held in the mind. In The Light Keepers, Jessica Marie Johnson traces this radical tradition through the centuries-long prism of American empire, from the holds of slave ships to contemporary digital worlds, showing that there is nothing finished or settled about how Black women understand time, trauma, and survival.
Blending personal narrative, archival fragments, and ancestral wisdom, Johnson reframes Black women not as subjects of history but as archivists and historians. Against erasure, against shame, against death itself, Black women have transformed the bitterest waters of history into tools for living, loving, and imagining freedom. The Light Keepers offers readers a daring new way to think about the past—and a powerful lesson in how knowledge is made when survival demands it.
This book is a labor of love and grief. I wrote it for the Black women who are historians and the ones who are never recognized as such—the grandmothers and the aunts, the collectors and the secret keepers, the late night drinkers and early morning readers, and, yes, the researchers and the archivists. The storytellers and memoryworkers.
I wrote it for my land of women! If you’ve been following this newsletter since it was a TinyLetter you know what I mean and you are absolutely part of the journey of this book! If you are new here, my land of women is the community of women, Black Puerto Rican, Black Chicago, Black and southern, whose love, care, and audacity has been the shining and saving light of my life.
We all have light keepers in our lives. This book is my way of honoring mine.
Y’all! What joy! I can’t wait to share more about the journey of this book here! And do you see this gorgeous art by Black woman printmaker Delita Martin (rep: Galerie Myrtis) on the cover?? OBSESSED!
I hope you’ll take a moment to grab a copy for yourself or share a link to the book on the W. W. Norton website.
And if you run a book club or any kind of book/reading/sharing space, drop me a line! I’d love to talk about the book with you or your community virtually or in person.
Jessica Marie Johnson is a historian of slavery, the Black South and the Caribbean using art, music & archives to teach and tell Black stories. Her new book, The Light Keepers: Black Women, History and the Long Fight Against Empire (W. W. Norton, 2027) is available for pre-order. Follow her on Instagram. Subscribe to kitchentablehistory.blog for updates. More at jessicamariejohnson.com.
Congratulations on the new book!