my mother’s tomorrow: dispatches through the lens of Baltimore’s Black Butterfly brings all of the editorials–which document everything from school shootings to Black Lives Matter, Trump’s first presidency to Black Covid Stories—together. These are the words and experiences of the people of Baltimore, written down and shared with the world so that they won’t be forgotten.

In Notes from a Colored Girl, Karsonya Wise Whitehead examines the life and experiences of Emilie Frances Davis through a close reading of three pocket diaries she kept from 1863 to 1865. Whitehead explores Davis’s worldviews and politics, her perceptions of both public and private events, her personal relationships, and her place in Philadelphia’s free black community in the nineteenth century. 

RaceBrave: new and selected works provides another glimpse into Karsonya Wise Whitehead’s work to document her experience raising two black boys in a post-racial America. On July 7, 2014, the day Eric Garner was murdered, Whitehead set out to write about what was happening across America to unarmed black people, in doing so she explores the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that resonate with parents around the country-sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness, but always with an ear that bends toward the truth. 

In Sparking the Genius, Whitehead outlines the Critical Moments in American History that defined both the beginning of the early Civil Rights Movement—with the release of the Emancipation Proclamation—and the modern Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Starting with the Birmingham Campaign (Project C), Whitehead outlines, defines, and deconstructs five Critical Moments including the release of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

The Rethinking Emilie Frances Davis companion reader is a supplemental curriculum guide that expands the work on Emilie Davis that was started in the award-winning book Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis (USC Press, May 2014) written by Karsonya Wise Whitehead. Curriculum designers from a range of content areas and grade levels offer common core aligned lesson plan sets for middle, high school, and college students that outline the scope and sequence and frame the organization of activities and assignments in a coherent fashion.

“I want you to be fully present in your own life, a change agent who is not afraid to dare to be who you are. I wonder though, my dear sweet child, how I can mother you when I have not been able to mother myself? How can I give you the tools to survive this brutal world when I have not been able to craft these tools to save myself? How can I stand up for you when my whole life has been spent trying so hard to stand up for myself? I am not perfect. I am flawed. I am pregnant. And in nine months, I will be your mother.” And so begins Karsonya Wise Whitehead’s first letter to her oldest son.