Your Mother Was a Panther

Stories in Verse

Black women are not a monolith. They are many things - beautiful and mysterious. Through magical and musical verse, Mixon offers alternative narratives, origin stories that challenge the limited societal views of women whose mere existence is at times a mystery, an amalgam of experiences - inherited and otherwise.

An orphan (who is adopted by a storm) tries to hold thunder in her mouth; a battered grandmother taps into her ancestral powers; an adolescent girl befriends a woman at the end of her life; a young woman searches for her elusive mother; a pregnant woman prepares to give birth as her husband is dying; familial love keeps music alive; and Harlem is running late.

©2017 Tara Mixon (P)2018 Tara Mixon