Black. Single. Mother.: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging

A personal meditation on, examination of, and tribute to Black single motherhood, unapologetically told through poignant essays and candid interviews, by a celebrated cultural critic.

Through her signature candid, humorous, and sometimes biting takes, Lemieux suffers no fools while also courageously revealing the scars of her own parenting journey and search for self-acceptance in a "baby mama" hating world. With a particular verve and relatability— honed, in part, from her many years among Black Twitter’s most prominent voices—Lemieux centers the complex reality of Black single motherhood: uncertainty and fierceness, alike. Black. Single. Mother. combines riveting personal essays infused with whip-smart cultural and historical analysis, along with twenty-one intimate, first-person testimonies from a spectrum of Black single mothers. A long overdue offering in celebration of the American matriarch most often maligned, Black. Single. Mother. sets out to inspire a new cultural and community dialogue about this powerful figure as one profoundly deserving of great love, support and respect.

Jamilah Lemieux is a renowned cultural critic and writer with a focus on issues of race, gender, and sexuality, A leading feminist thinker, social influencer, and game-changing media maverick, Lemieux has written for a host of platforms, including the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Essence, Playboy, The Cut, The Guardian, Colorlines, The Washington Post, Wired, Self, Refinery29, and The New York Times. She was prominently featured in Lifetime's critically acclaimed docuseries Surviving R. Kelly and Surviving R. Kelly 2: The Reckoning. She also appeared in A&E's Secrets of Playboy. She penned the forewords for the anniversary editions of Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and Ann Petry's Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Currently, she writes a weekly advice column for Slate's "Care and Feeding" parenting section and is a co-host for the publication's Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast. She resides in Los Angeles.