Amena Brown on Getting All the Way Free

Episode 156

Nine years is a long time between visits. When Amena Brown was last on the show in 2017, she was a spoken word poet booked solid inside white evangelicalism, doing one poem at a time between worship songs and quietly wondering how much longer she could keep walking back in. She came back to tell Jen what happened next.

This conversation traces the whole arc: the green rooms where she was told her grief was divisive, the healing circle where a Black woman looked her dead in the face and said you have to get out, the three months of panic attacks that followed, and the call from Tracee Ellis Ross that showed her a bigger world was possible. It is a story about leaving before you have a new boat built.

Then there is the book. Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl started as a poetry collection and became something wilder, funnier, and more free. Amena talks about Black Girl as a verb, the essay she cried writing, her list of qualifying reasons for a Black Woman Day Off, and why the audiobook has a live Black girl audience hollering back. Bring your cheekbones. They are going to be sore.