Biomythography Bayou

Mel Michelle Lewis

2024
214 pages
$26.95
ISBN 9781684484812
The Griot Project Book Series

When your stories flow from the brackish waters of the Gulf South, where the land and water merge, your narratives cannot be contained or constrained by the Eurocentric conventions of autobiography. When your story is rooted in the histories of your West African, Creek, and Creole ancestors, as well as your Black, feminist, and queer communities, you must create a biomythography that transcends linear time and extends beyond the pages of a book.

Biomythography Bayou is more than just a book of memoir; it is a ritual for conjuring queer embodied knowledges and decolonial perspectives. Blending a rich gumbo of genres - from ingredients such as praise songs, folk tales, recipes, incantations, and invocations - it also includes a multimedia component, with "bayou tableau" images and audio recording links. Inspired by such writers as Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia Butler, Mel Michelle Lewis draws from the well of her ancestors in order to chart a course toward healing Afrofutures. Showcasing the nature, folklore, dialect, foodways, music, and art of the Gulf's coastal communities, Lewis finds poetic ways to celebrate their power and wisdom.

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Reviews
"A bountiful feast of a book. . . . The first thing you notice about Biomythography Bayou is its fecundity, its rich and generous voice. Yet not a word is wasted. Right from the start, you feel the presence of ancestors, their interwoven histories, and the effulgence of Lewis as a Black, queer woman with a complex heritage. . . . [An] effusive celebration of a book recommended to readers of all stripes, ages, and walks of life."
- Washington Independent Review of Books, November 2024

"Biomythography Bayou is a stunningly beautiful medicinal offering that I did not know I needed. The recipes, story-telling, poetry, and honoring of origin, memory, and ancestry are profoundly compelling. I could not put this book down. Take your time, savor, and surrender to the magic of Mel Michelle Lewis." ~gina Breedlove, author of The Vibration of Grace: Sound Healing Rituals for Liberation

"This innovative and tender manuscript is an absolute pleasure to read. Sensually Southern, fem(me)ininely curving, and rhythmically grounded, Biomythography Bayou is an everyday praise song to Black queer spirit and the landscapes that raise us." ~Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, author of Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders

"Biomythography Bayou is a beautiful assembly and chorus of experimental prose that evocatively explores kinship, a region, ecologies, Black queer longing, and politics. It is an elegant and spirit-filled work that summons and communes with ancestors and the living who continue to quilt a Black lesbian and queer writing tradition. Biomythography Bayou experiments with and bends form in ways that invite and inspire more innovation. This work is a stunning contribution to Black lesbian and queer southern and diasporic writing." ~Tiffany Lethabo King, author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies

"Lewis' Biomythography Bayou is an explosive dance party of culture, identity, and word magic, and above all, it is a truth-telling serum. A balm for generations lost and those voices unheard, this is a project that celebrates, contests, and frames family and legacy in a decolonial context that breathes new life into the waterways and bayous of the Gulf Coast. . . . A must-read!" ~Andrew Jolivétte, author of Gumbo Circuitry: Poetic Routes, Gastronomic Legacies

About the author:

MEL MICHELLE LEWIS (she/they), vice president for people, justice, and cultural affairs at American Rivers, is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, teacher, and environmental justice practitioner. Their creative work explores nature writing themes in rural coastal settings through the lens of Black, Creole, Afro-Indigenous, and queer embodied knowledges. Originally from Bayou La Batre on the Alabama Gulf Coast, they currently reside in Baltimore. Read more here: melmichellelewis.com

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $59.95, 9781684484829; EPUB: $26.95, 9781684484836