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.