Letter from the Editor
The selected contributors' writings center personal investigations into family histories, Black material culture, and memory work.
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The Black Ordinary Zine
Issue 1
2025
Contributors
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Chenoa Baker
She/Her
Chenoa Baker is a curator, writer, professor, and descendant of self-emancipators. She has contributed to major exhibitions including Simone Leigh and Simone Leigh: Sovereignty at ICA/Boston, Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Peabody Essex Museum, and Touching Roots: Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas at the MFA/Boston. In recognition of her curatorial work, she received the WBUR Maker Award and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2024. In 2023, she won the AICA Young Art Critics Prize for her writing. She writes for Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Public Parking, Material Intelligence, and Studio Potter, among others.
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Q El Crosby
She/Her
Q El Crosby is a writer from the Westside of Chicago, now based in Los Angeles. She co-authors the poetic Substack, Noncette and the serialized fiction Substack, Parallethea. A former English teacher, Crosby is a proud alumna of Loyola Marymount University’s Writing and Producing for TV graduate program. Her work spans essays, poetry, and screenwriting, with past industry experience on Swagger (Apple) and Genius (National Geographic). She was a semifinalist in the 2021 Women Write Now Fellowship, and belongs to the 2023 Fall cohort of the Mara Brock Akil’s Writer’s Colony.
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NOVA CYPRESS BLACK
Dey/Dem/NOVA
NOVA CYPRESS BLACK writes deir name in all caps as a reminder to take up space as a disabled Black trans gender-expansive lighthouse. Pre-transition, dey were a recipient of fellowships from Poets House, The Poetry Project, Willow Arts Alliance & Cave Canem. NOVA's poetry has graced the pages of Strange Horizons; Fifth Wheel Press; 580 Split; Zone 3 Press; etc. This nomadic MFA dropout was also a writer on season 3 of Showtime's The L Word: Generation Q. NOVA is a genre-defying writer, movement artist, documentarian & educator who pledges allegiance to liberation & pleasure.
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Olivia Dorsey Peacock
She/Her
Olivia Dorsey Peacock is a family historian, poet, and tea maven based in North Carolina. In her work, she dissects the lineage of expectation, re-imagines ancestral memory, and measures the contours of legacy. Her work often focuses on authentic, creative engagements with Black history, memory, and archives. She has received fellowships and support from The Watering Hole, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Arts & Science Council. She has served as Charlotte Lit’s 2025 GoodLit Poetry Fellow and as a 2025 Goodyear Arts Artist-in-Residence. Her writing has appeared in Lucky Jefferson, The Petigru Review, poetry.onl, and Shot Glass Journal.
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Sydney Mayes
She/They
Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the Winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award and the inaugural ONLY POEMS ‘Poet of the Year’. Her poems have been published in The Atlantic, Poets.org, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal and The Kenyon Review among other publications. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
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Jamayka Young
Any Pronouns
Jamayka Young is a storyteller from South Jersey, with deep roots in the Chesapeake Bay. Their writing is expansive and interdisciplinary, spanning poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Writing about African American culture, identity, and folklore, their work serves as prayer, archive, and critical fabulation for African American history, present, and futures. Jamayka has been a fellow at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, The Committee on Black Performing Arts, A4Arts, and Cave Canem with an upcoming residency at Bathers Library. Their work has appeared in Reed Magazine and Fruitslice.
Production
Kaitlyn B. Jones
She/Her
TBO Founder/Director
Ess Paige
They/Them
Editor
This issue of The Black Ordinary Zine is made possible by a 2024-25 Round II Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC.
For more Black art, Black archives, and Black autonomy, visit TheBlackOrdinary.com
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