African American Women Writers

She is a woman who lives between pleasure and pain--the pure, scintillating pleasure of the flesh and the kind of pain that has rocked the world and left it strewn with chaos set to a hip-hop beat. Her name is Damali Richards. And when she makes love to a master vampire, it changes everything in a struggle between good and evil--with the future of humanity hanging in the balance... THE BITTENIn L.A. Bank's astounding new Vampire Huntress novel, an unforgettable scene of seduction touches off a violent race around the world--and into a realm beneath us. For Damali, once a pawn, has been given a new, pulsating power of her own--bitten by lover and vampire extraordinaire Carlos Rivera. Between them, they know how high the stakes have risen. A powerful lord of darkness has hijacked a mystical key containing the blood of Christ. And for a world where blood runs like a river, one drop ofthis blood will be the end...

Damali Richards knows all about a blood rush. The kind that happened when she first went skin-to-skin with former vampire Carlos Rivera. Or the kind that happened on the streets of Philadelphia, when her crew took on the devil's own. Now, Damali, Carlos, and the Guardian team are recovering in the Arizona desert, trying to hold it all together and find out how much love, and how much war, they still need to make...until the demon consort Lilith changes everything. The Damned are seeping out from below, and a new contagion is spreading simply by touch. For Damali and Carlos, time is running out. With Armageddon near, the ultimate truths lie strewn from a shaken underworld to the pristine mountains of Tibet, where the two lovers will approach a pinnacle of power--and the scintillating, shocking secret of salvation....

The Chairman of the Vampire Council is dead. Lilith, the consort of the Unnamed One, and the Unnamed One himself are out for revenge against Vampire Huntress Damali Richards and her lover, Carlos Rivera. A ruthless and carefully planned strategy has been developed--one that is powerful enough to destroy them both while the fate of the world hangs in the balance...   THEFORSAKEN   Now there is only one entity who can best Damali, send Carlos packing, and put the Guardian team at mortal risk. This powerful being was once banished into a forsaken land and possesses everything that would bring a Neteru to his or her knees. Now it's not only Damali's soul that she risks losing--but her heart....    

Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre's historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory. Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror's ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror's semiotics within their own imaginary. Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare's Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.