My Beautiful People

On May 1st, I’m hosting my second community spelling bee. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to the curatorial form of the ‘spelling bee,’ but I think it’s because it was the container for my first time seeing strangers root for me. In the second grade, I won 2nd place in my elementary school spelling bee.

I remember wondering why the big kids were so glued to my turns. Toward the front left of the auditorium was a glittering cluster of black sixth graders who felt so tall and imposing to my little self but in hindsight must have been as fragile as I. When my nemesis and I started volleying spells back and forth in the final showdown of the contest, I recall their invested stares and their tightly held breaths. We shared a collective tension that felt kind and knowing. I went blank on a relatively simple word - I won’t go into it here … you can ask me about it at the show and maybe I’ll oblige, I don’t know. Every champ remembers their losing word - it’s like our white whale - but what I ultimately learned at my second grade spelling bee was the fact of racial subjectivity. In the tradition of Issa Rae, the big kids were rooting for everybody black. Join us.

Graphic reimaginations by jessica ogwumike, riffing on images courtesy of the Society for Visual Education, 1970.

Chicago, 1970. Two teachers organized the children of Harold Ickes to create the Black ABCs: alphabet cards representing Black childhood as beautiful and playful, and encouraging cultural pride and literacy. I’ll bring this reissue of the deck to the bee :)

Ideating…

A spelling bee for the coming spring. The libraries we amass are monuments to our values. With this one, the world I’m curating resides over the reading rainbow. It is rooted in local histories of Black education for liberation and highlights literacy as a tool of Black and queer liberation.

For instance, Black lesbian mother warrior poet Audre Lorde’s early foundation as a Black feminist theorist was laid by Black librarian and storyteller Augusta Baker, who read to her as a child. As she recalled, “What [Ms. Baker] did, I was going to do too and was going to have it for my own…I learned how to read, I learned how to talk, I learned how to write. Later I became a librarian.”

Watching…

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Matilda (1996)

Akeelah and The Bee (2006)

The Great Debaters (2007)

The Secret Life of Bees (2008)

Listening…

Talking Book (Stevie Wonder, 1972)

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Lauryn Hill, 1998)

To Whom This May Concern (Jill Scott, 2026)