My Books
Our Brave Foremothers
When we think about women’s history, who do we consider, and who do we omit?
In the beautiful 320 pages of Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, discover an intergenerational, intercultural bouquet of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women lifted into the significance that they deserve.
From the Introduction
I was intimidated, as a little girl, when it was time to visit my older aunties. Their dimly lit living rooms, thick, upholstered couches covered with yellowing plastic that stuck to the backs of my legs, faded, photographic tryptichs of Jesus, Martin, and JFK above the kitchen entryway – it was a constrained contrast to the colorful, cacaphonous 1970s world outside their windows. Though no longer recent urban transplants, they retained many Down Aouth mannerisms and admonitions: Don’t interrupt (in fact, speak only when asked a question); sit up straight, young lady; go get your mama a cool drink – but don’t leave that Frigidaire open too long and run up my light bill… My younger self, a tomboy who would’ve rather been playing Wiffle ball with the boys on the neighbourhood asphalt diamond, who squawked and guffawed over preteen stuff with my schoolmates, was forced into a rigid mold of respectable ladylikeness.
Little did I realize that the snippets of time and talk – tales of bills, bad boyfriends and churchgoing husbands, Jesus, wayward adult children, getting into all kinds of trouble (not the John Lewis, good trouble, kind of trouble, just baaaad trouble), Jesus, tsk-tsking about the war, fretting about the cost of chicken thighs, the latest thing the mayor wanted to do, the health or illness of relatives Down South, Jesus, and a whole lot of topics that went way over my head – were acts of women inserting themselves into history, perhaps little h history, but as significant as any building block of a person‘s legacy. By just being alive and somehow managing to keep it together well enough to raise me, my older cousins, and the little ones coming up, by staying safe and sanctified and as whole as they could, these women embodied spirit, resilience, and bravery. Only decades later did I see that these women, my foremothers, forged a direct bridge to those who had come before.
It was this very foremother spirit that visited me on Christmas Day in 2019, waking me from sleep with a whisper to “tell my story.“ When that ancestral voice spoke to me – across centuries, I believe – I felt called to meet as many of these women in history as I could and to make them the center of a creative endeavor, which I called the Brave Sis Project. This soon expanded into a dignified pantheon of women – Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous – all of whom had far too often been forgotten, ignored, or erased, and, in many cases, were as anonymous as my aunties. In your hands, you hold only a petal of this ever-expanding, intergenerational, intercultural bouquet of women being lifted into the significance they deserve.
From Etel Adnan to Mary Jones, Thelma Garcia Buchholdt to Pura Belpré to Zitkála-Šá, you will meet 100 women of color who left a lasting mark on United States history. Including both famous and little-known names, the thoughtful profiles and detailed portraits of these women herald their achievements and passions.
To consider on a deeper level the devotedness of Clara Brown, the fearlessness of Jovita Idár, the guts of Grace Lee Boggs, or the selflessness of Martha Louise Morrow Foxx is, in the words of one reader “a book that should be gifted to every girl child born in the United States.” But this is a book written for adults, with a provocative prompt following each entry, inviting you to connect your life to theirs, an inspiring way to understand their influence and the power of their stories.
With 100 original illustrations by Joelle Avelino, an award-winning, London-based Congolese and Angolan illustrator. Some of her illustration projects include Hey You! An Empowering Celebration of Growing Up Black, winner of the British Book Awards Illustrated Book of the Year, and an animation for the Malala Fund that was featured among Design Week’s favorite International Women’s Day projects. Most recently, she served as a guest illustrator for the BBC’s 500 Words children’s writing competition, joining Queen Camilla at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the winning young authors in a special World Book Day event. www.joelleavelino.com
Work in Progress
World Brave Sis
World Brave Sis: 100 Dream‑Time Dialogues with Women Who Led the Way is my next book project, a multi‑volume, highly designed series that amplifies the voices of 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women from across history and around the globe.
As a companion to my Nautilus Award‑winning Our Brave Foremothers, which introduced readers to 100 women in the U.S. context, World Brave Sis moves beyond biographical sketches into intimate, first‑person “imagined interviews” that invite these foremothers to speak directly to our times.
Through a blend of cultural history, narrative reimagining, and what I call dream‑time or psychic channeling, I enter into conversation with women whose lives are well documented as well as those whose stories were never fully recorded, creating composite narratives rooted in deep research, cultural context, and ancestral listening. These dialogues explore their struggles, triumphs, interior worlds, and the unfinished work of justice, offering readers a vivid sense of their humanity and a time‑traveling perspective on how our world has changed—and how much work remains.
Visually, World Brave Sis is conceived as three to four colorful, typographically distinctive volumes—part cultural‑history compendium, part historical fiction, part spiritual‑ancestral practice, with light memoir threads when my own international life intersects with the places and people featured. Think James (by Percival Everett) meets Oprah, with a splash of Christiane Amanpour and Hey Girl Podcast energy, resulting in a reading experience that is accessible, profound, and unapologetically devoted to restoring voice and agency to women the archive has ignored or erased.
The primary audience includes readers of diverse women’s history, educators and students in women’s, ethnic, and global studies, fans of creative historical nonfiction, spiritual seekers drawn to ancestral wisdom, and international women’s leadership and social‑justice communities, with strong resonance for book clubs looking for rich, discussion‑ready texts. Secondary audiences range from museums and cultural institutions to libraries and gift‑book buyers seeking visually stunning, globally inclusive work.
You can explore the in‑progress roster of 100 women who will appear in World Brave Sis via our live document. You can also support the project and follow along as this global Brave Sis vision comes to life!