Somehow we are almost half way through August, which means Black Storytelling Week is just a few weeks away! This year’s theme is, “What we inherit, what we pass on.” What lessons have tattooed themselves on your heart? Whose features did you receive? What recipes have you been entrusted to keep? What prayers were you taught? What land has your name on it? Black Storytelling Week 2026 is a call to reflect on, honor, or release the tangible and intangibles that pass through generations: lessons, recipes, heirlooms, traditions, gifts, blessings, dreams, habits, features, land, and more.

What is Black Storytelling Week?

Falling on the second week of September, Black Storytelling Week is an annual holiday for passing down Black family history. Whether your family is adopted, given, or chosen, it’s a time to create new rituals and traditions around sharing and preserving stories about who you are and where you come from. In 2026, Black Storytelling Week is Sunday, September 6 to Saturday, September 12.

How to Celebrate

The best way to celebrate Black Storytelling Week is with people you love and who love you back. Whether its spending an afternoon learning a recipe from an elder; gathering your cousins to finally begin that family tree project; showing a little one photos of their ancestors; envisioning a new family with your friends; or some solo journaling, meditation, and reflection; there is no one way to mark this occasion.

If you need ideas for a place to start, check out our Conversation Guide for activities and pre-and after care. Watch this space for more closer-to, including question and journal prompts catered to our theme.

Mark Your Calendar

In the meantime, add Black Storytelling Week to your calendar, and don’t forget to let your people know about it, too! Pick an hour that you all will spend together now, so that you’re not scrambling when the week arrives (you know time flies).

Join us online and IRL

This year I’m also hosting two community celebrations, one virtual and one in-person in Brooklyn NY:

“What We Inherit:” A storytelling circle about things passed between generations. Wednesday, Sept 9, 2026 | 7-9PM EDT | Online

Think of this storytelling circle as a virtual campfire: an intimate, participatory and gentle space to share and express memories while being held in community.

Bring a story to share. Together, we’ll reflect on, celebrate and release things we’ve inherited, and dream about we’d like to pass on.

RSVP

Black Storytelling Fest: Make something that tells your people’s story. Saturday, September 12 | 12-5PM | Brooklyn, NY

We are taking over the historic Akwaaba Mansion to bring a day of FREE family portraits, grocery giveaway, scrapbooking, family interviews, archiving kits, deed theft support, music and more to Black families of all make ups across New York City! Bring your grandma, your play cousins, your love, or your best friends to make something that tells your story, together.

Reservations are highly recommended for portraits and family interviews.

REGISTER

More to come!

Peace,

Martina

Hey Y’all,

I love the month of June, it’s my favorite month. It’s the month that transitions us from spring into summer, and one with so much to celebrate: Pride Month, Juneteenth, Black Music Month, Caribbean Heritage Month. Four weeks that call our attention to our many heritages, identities, and creations. Four weeks that commemorate our legacies of resistance and building worlds worthy of our living in them.

This post moved me because it speaks to something at the heart of all our June celebrations: the courage to imagine and create another way. And for Black families - whether adopted, given, or chosen - that imagination has always been an act of survival and love.

For Black Storytelling Week, June is a call to honor how we have survived this world: by making family. By choosing to nurture, protect, care for, and preserve others as our own. To do so while in bondage, regardless of whether it was legal, in the face of persecution, through displacement, on new and foreign lands. To look at a Black life and deem it worthy of love. That is the legacy of the Black family, and it’s woven throughout every celebration this month.

This June, I’m asking: How will you honor this legacy? What story of survival, love, and imagination lives in you?

Here are two ways to explore that:

Join me in Brooklyn this Saturday

I’ve collaborated with to host Gather & Tell: A Storytelling Circle at in Bed-Stuy.

What story lives inside the photograph or object you carry? Together, we will practice the long tradition of honoring our loved ones through oral storytelling.

Bring a photograph or object that holds meaning for you, something connected to an elder, family member, or meaningful moment in your life, and tell a story behind it.

June 6 · 3-5pm 📍 The Free Black Women’s Library (226 Marcus Garvey Blvd, Brooklyn, NY)

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Help me plan our June convening

Our April and May convenings had lower interest than expected, and I want to make sure our June gathering meets you where you are. Help me plan by sharing what would work best for you:

Peace,

Martina

I know how difficult it can be to find time to start or continue that family history project. I understand how isolating this work can become, and the weight of doing it alone. But we have each other, so let’s change that!

Our next convening: Wednesday, April 29

Our April 2026 convening is a Discovery Hour, aka dedicated time to begin or make progress on that family history project you’ve been putting off in the company of other Black kin keepers. Use the time however you need, but here are some ideas:

• Work on your family tree or genogram

• Search records databases

• Organize and file your findings

• Create a website or presentation deck for your family

• Journal about a recent discovery, or one you hope to make

• Prepare questions you want to ask an elder or relative

This event is virtual and free, with a suggested contribution of $10. We’ll get started at 7pm ET and go until 8:30pm.

See you then!

RSVP TO OUR APRIL CONVENING

Peace,

Martina

I’m Martina, a storyteller and cultural worker in Brooklyn. I started Black Storytelling Week in 2023 after trying to interview my normally chatty grandma about her life, and she clammed up. Our time together made me start thinking about how to make passing down stories within our families easier, and how to support the new adults (hello, my fellow Millennials) in stepping into our season as culture bearers.

Subscribe now

Pinterest, Source Unknown

Hey Y’all,

I hope the early days of Spring are bringing some fresh energy and feelings of renewal. I’ve started to acknowledge the season as the true new year it is - so if you could use a restart on 2026, Happy New Year to you, too!

Thank you to everyone who came out to our February Convening. I loved meeting so many folks doing the important, sacred work of discovering and keeping their family stories. Learning more about what’s coming up for you in your journeys got my gears turning. I took time to download what you shared and am re-emerging with exciting updates, including a calendar of events for Black kin-keepers this spring.

Starting this month, our Convenings will move to monthly, so mark your calendars for last the Wednesday of each month from 7-8:30pm ET. The focus of these Convenings will rotate according to the needs surfaced in February: dedicated time to do research, space to ask questions and get unstuck, and an outlet to share our family discoveries and stories. Guest speakers from the Black Storytelling Week community and special events will be sprinkled in.

Lastly, I’m also introducing a suggested contribution of $10 for all Convenings, to support the costs of keeping the work going. Please offer what you can!

Black Storytelling Week Spring Calendar

Spring is full! In addition to monthly Convenings, we’re hosting special events with two friends of ours, Imagination Doulas and We The Diaspora.

• April 15 · “Where Yo People From” — The Lands that Keep Us, Part 1

  7:30–9PM EDT · 🌐 Virtual · In partnership with Imagination Doulas

  The Lands that Keep Us is an intimate three-part story circle series, led by Imagination Doulas, which honors Black relationships to land. “Where Yo People From” is the first session, a story circle about family roots, places of origin, memories of land, and stories passed down by elders about Black landowners and placemakers.

  SIGN UP

  ---

• April 29 · Discovery Hour - Black Storytelling Week Monthly Convening

  7-8:30PM EDT · 🌐 Virtual · Suggested contribution: $10

  

  Discovery Hour is a coworking session for the family historian. Come through to make some progress on your family history project. Use the time how you like, maybe start or continue research, prepare questions to ask a family member, organize previous findings, or create a family presentation or website.

  RSVP

  ---

• May 13 · (We Are) Of This Land Showcase - The Lands That Keep Us, Part 2

  7:30–9PM ET · 🌐 Virtual · In partnership with Imagination Doulas

  Join us for Part 2 of The Lands That Keep Us. (We Are) Of This Land is a showcase centering on artifacts — photographs, articles, family heirlooms, documents — anything that symbolizes your historical and present relationship with the lands we come from, the ancestral homes we long for, and our visions of a spatially reparative future.

  SIGN UP

  ---

• May 27 · Community Jam - Black Storytelling Week Monthly Convening

  7-8:30PM EDT · 🌐 Virtual · Suggested contribution: $10

  

  Not sure how to navigate asking questions to an elder? Need help finding a name or date in your research? Let the community help you towards your breakthrough. Community Jam is a hands-on and reciprocal session for getting unstuck. Bring a question, and together we’ll help each other find a path forward.

  RSVP

  ---

• June 6 · Gather & Tell: Community Storytelling Circle

  Details TBA ·📍 In Person, Brooklyn, NY · In partnership with We The Diaspora

  During this storytelling circle, we’ll share memories of elders, reflect on the power of oral history, and explore simple ways to preserve the stories that shape our families and communities.

  ---

• June 10 · Speculative Story Circle - The Lands That Keep Us, Part 3

  7:30–9PM ET · 🌐 Virtual · In partnership with Imagination Doulas

  Close out The Lands That Keep Us with a speculative story circle, harvesting from the futures we wish to see. We will connect with our ancestors, descendants, and future selves to learn how to survive this moment. We will close by honoring the ancestors and pouring libations.

  SIGN UP

I hope to see you in the weeks and months ahead. When we keep our history alive, it will not be erased.

Peace,

Martina

Over the last few weeks our community has grown, with new subscribers coming into the fold. Welcome!

Happy Black History Month! This year marks the 100th anniversary of Negro History Week, which eventually grew to become Black History Month.

Carter G. Woodson created Negro History Week in 1926 with a vision to build a culture around studying and celebrating the Black race. He chose February because at the time, Black folks had already established a tradition of commemorating Frederick Douglass’ and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays during this month. But more than esteemed public figures, Woodson was focused on revering the accomplishments of everyday people. He believed that “history was made by the people, not simply or primarily by great men.” He imagined Black folks gathering in homes, businesses, churches, and more to read, discuss, share and pass down the stories that form our collective history and legacies.

I didn’t know it back in 2023 when the idea for Black Storytelling Week came to me, but this holiday is part of Woodson’s lineage.

Black Storytelling Week is a national campaign and annual holiday dedicated to passing down family history - whether your family is adopted, given, or chosen. The holiday falls on the second week of September, in 2026 that’s Sept 6 -12. The vision is for Black families world-wide to develop new rituals around gathering to share stories across generations, and honoring who they are and where they come from.

I imagine barriers dissolving between relatives;

New and restored relationships between kin;

Stronger kinship amongst loved ones;

And a deeper sense of pride, identity, and belonging for all Black people.

If you’re new to this, keep it simple. Celebrating can be as straightforward as asking an elder one question over the phone, or gathering three family members to look through old photos together. There's no wrong way to get started.

Add BSW 2026 to Your Calendar

Black Storytelling Week exists to support you and yours on this journey. We produce guides and community celebrations for families of all kinds to spark conversations, and document and preserve their stories. Since launching, I've seen people interview their elders, take their first family portrait, create a family archive, and even take part in organizing their family reunions.

Throughout the year, we also host convenings for kin keepers and family historians of all experience levels to find community, share resources, and learn from one another. In the past, these gatherigs have focused on topics from how to navigate tender conversations with elders to navigating family history research.

As our community grows, so does our programming. What we've got going on in 2026

This year, I have lots of ideas (a retreat, anyone?) and want to carve out more intentional space for doing the work, together (think, family history research co-working sessions, and share-back sessions where you can share what you’ve discovered, ask questions, and get advice on how to move your research or preservation work forward).

But before I get into planning, I’d love to hear from you. Join me for our first convening of 2026 on Wednesday, February 11 at 7pm EST. This one will offer a chance to meet other folks on their kin-keeping journeys, share what’s most pressing or intimidating for you, and shape our programming this year.

RSVP

See you soon,

Martina

Founding Organizer, Black Storytelling Week

In this post you’ll find a reflection on our Convenings this year, prompts for our winter Holiday Challenge, and the highlights + recording from our December gathering.

Hey Y’all,

At the end of last year, the idea came to me to seek community with those doing the sacred work of discovering, documenting, keeping, and passing on their family history. I made a call on Threads, and a few months later, in February 2025, we had our very first Family Historians Convening.

The energy was high, and folks were excited to continue gathering. So gather we did - 6 times in total this year, bringing together almost 150 people. Together we discussed everything from navigating tender conversations with elders, to making progress and staying motivated in family research, to how to organize, store, and share our findings. We hosted a storytelling circle where we exchanged stories and memories about the people, places, and beings that raised us, and together we workshopped how to ask family members about tough or sensitive subjects. Special thank you to Austen Smith, Lisa Y. Henderson, and Joanne Griffith for guiding some of those sessions and sharing your expertise with us all.

Moving into 2026, I’m excited to carve out space for us to go deeper into our practices, together. Think: opportunities to share what you’ve discovered or receive feedback on how to get “unstuck,” dedicated time to research together, and more support with speaking to elders and passing down the history and stories you’ve gathered.

In January I’ll be reaching out for input on what you’d like to do and see next year, so stay tuned!

Have a beautiful holiday. Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa to those who celebrate, and Happy New Year to all.

Winter Holiday Challenge

Whether you’re spending time these next few weeks with loved ones, chosen family, or solo, the season calls for meaningful reflection. Use this winter holiday challenge as an opportunity to remember your people’s stories, or to create new ones. As always, this is your journey. Do what feels right and take it slowly if you need to.

Here’s our challenge for the winter holiday season:

• Document a holiday tradition or ritual you’d like to pass on or create.

• Who do you miss during this holiday? Who do you wish could be here? Make a holiday card for them.

• Draft a wish list of intangibles you’d like to receive or experience in 2026.

And if you’re comfortable, share what comes up for you by tagging @blackstorytellingweek on IG or Threads.

December Convening Recap

OMG, our December Convening was so gooood! Journalist and author Joanne Griffith walked us through her journey filling out her family tree since 2007, offering wisdom, advice, and resources that made a difference along the way. When I tell you that folks were making new family discoveries during the call in real time?! It was a testament to the power of knowledge sharing.

Some highlights from the conversation:

• Get creative with sources. Beyond census records and birth/death certificates, things like church baptism records, newspaper archives, and gravesite records can can help pinpoint important dates, names or places. Here are some sources Joanne has found helpful:

  • Sites

    • Family Search

    • My Heritage

    • Digital Library of the Caribbean

    • Storied (Digital newspapers)

  • Books

    • Tracing Your Ancestors by Geraldine Lane

    • Today in Bajan History (Almanac)

• To help elders recall memories:

  • Consider place and artifacts. Taking a drive through the family neighborhood, looking at old photographs, or even making a visit to a museum can surface memories.

  • Use the grand-babies. Sometimes who is asking a question will get you a different answer. If an elder tends to be tightlipped or has trouble recalling, try inviting a younger generation into the conversation. And asking the same questions to multiple family members might help you get a fuller picture about a person, place, or event.

If you missed or want to revisit the Convening, the replay is available below. And if you have questions or want to share your own wins, drop them in the comments.

Here’s to closing out 2025 with intention.

With love,

Martina

Cover photo credit: Vielles Annonces

Hey Y’all,

I wanted to send you love and care as we head into the holiday season. This time of year can bring a range of feelings - reunion and celebration; grief and loneliness; reflection and solemnity, and more. Sometimes they come in waves, sometimes everything all at once. However this season finds you, I hope you take good care, and find moments to honor and connect with those in your life who have and do show up as family.

In my last bulletin I shared that we’re issuing a challenge this holiday. It’s meant to inspire meaningful connection and reflection with loved ones, and give you a starting point for documenting and passing down your family history in the weeks ahead. As always, this is your journey. Do what feels right, and go at whatever pace you need to.

Here are the challenge prompts for Thanksgiving. Answer, one, two, or all three:

• Document one family recipe and a memory you have tied to it.

• Who do you miss during this holiday? What would you say to them if they could be here with you? Write them a letter.

• Take a photo with whoever you’re celebrating with. Selfies count!

If you’re comfortable, share your stories by tagging @blackstorytellingweek on IG or Threads. I’d love to see them.

RSVP: Our Final Gathering of 2025

We are down to our final convening of the year! Join us Wednesday, December 10 from 7-8:30pm ET for a conversation about navigating your family research journey with Joanne Griffith, a journalist, author, and entrepreneur who first began filling out her family tree in 2007. From archival research to family interviews, Joanne will share her findings, stories, and learnings. If you have questions about how to get started or how to regain momentum with your family history research, this session is for you.

RSVP

What I’m Holding Close This Season

As I reflect on what I’m grateful for, this community is at the top of the list. Getting to share space with you, and learn more about your families and journeys has truly filled my cup. I love the care and consideration you’ve all shown each other - THANK YOU. I’m brand new to family history keeping and I’ve learned so much from your stories and practices. This group continues to inspire and motivate me and I look forward to what 2026 will hold.

2025 was extra special: it marked the third annual Black Storytelling Week and our first ever community celebration in Brooklyn, NY! Over 200 people stopped by Weeksville Heritage Center for a free day of art and storytelling hosted in collab with NATAL. Guests posed for portraits with photographer , created zines about the people, places and beings that raised them in workshops led by artist , and sat down to interview one another in oral storytelling sessions guided by an award-winning producer. It was an honor to collaborate with other artists, creatives and cultural workers to offer families a space to document themselves and create special keepsakes.

Here are some of the photos captured during the day:

I hope you have a beautiful week, and I’ll see you soon,
Martina

If you’ve ever had to host a holiday, you know the key is to give yourself enough prep time. That’s why, even though I’m a stickler about giving each holiday its time and not jumping ahead to the next, we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving before Halloween has even come and gone.

RSVP: Our Next Convening

With Thanksgiving and the holidays on the horizon, our next convening will focus on how to start and navigate family history conversations with your loved ones.

Between travel, cooking, games, and joking on your cousins, it’s easy for the time together to fly by. And if I’m being honest, raising certain conversations can feel a little awkward, especially if it’s not how your folks normally get down.

That’s why thinking ahead and having a plan can be helpful. Join us Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30pm ET to create one.

This will be a hands-on session: bring the questions you want to ask, and together we’ll come up with strategies for how you can organically connect with your family member(s), deepen your bonds, and unlock new stories.

RSVP

Coming Soon: “Home for the Holidays” Challenge

Keeping with the spirit of the holidays, this year we’re hosting our first ever “Home for the Holidays Challenge” - a set of prompts to inspire storytelling within our families during the festive season.

Part of my inspiration for Black Storytelling Week was my desire to get to know my Grandma, my dad’s mom and my last living grandparent, beyond her role as our family and community matriarch. I had a revelation when I turned 30: I started to see all these people who raised me as people. And it made me crave a new kind of relationship with them.

For my Grandma, I was curious to understand what it felt like for her to leave Alabama at 18 with my grandfather, saying goodbye to her parents and ten siblings. I wanted to hear about how she built a life and found friends — and eventually an extended chosen family — in New York. I desired real talk about what it was like to raise six kids in the 1960s and 70s, and how she maintained her sense of self. My grandma is fly, always dressed to the nines. She was a deaconess who also enjoyed her rum-and-cokes, and she still plays the slot machines and sports long red nails to this day. I needed the tea on managing haters, because she had to have more than one!

Over the years I’ve gotten some of my questions answered, and others I haven’t yet had the opportunity to explore. As you likely already know, this work is not linear. For me, it’s just as much about the relationships and connection as it is about the stories and history. This moment calls on us to cultivate both.

What about you?

As I prepare this challenge, I’d love to hear from you: what kinds of stories are you most interested in exchanging with your adopted, blood, or chosen kin? You can reply to this email, or leave a comment on Substack to let me know and shape the challenge.

Something New: Bulletin Board

From time to time, I’d like to use these bulletins to share examples of family storytelling, archiving, and memory work that inspire us. If you come across work that makes an impression, I invite you to share it with me via email or chat.

In “The Nickersons,” beautifully honors the life of Rodney Nickerson and the legacy of the Nickerson Garden Housing Project in Watts, CA, where her family lived while transitioning from Mississippi to California in the 1950s.

Echoes of Elsewhere

The Nickersons

The following post is from my drafts. I wrote it back in December, shortly after TDE hosted their annual Christmas concert and toy drive in Watts. It was imagined as a component of an ongoing series about the GNX album and the feelings it conjured up in me. This one was inspired by “Wacced Out Murals” which, for no reason at all, plays on a loop in my h…

Read more

2 years ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Brooklyne

See you soon,

Martina

Black Storytelling Week has come to a beautiful close. Whether you stopped by our community celebrations or made time to connect with a loved one on your own, I hope that you found a way to honor, document, or share the stories about who and where you come from.

The week for me was such a special celebration of the many ways we make family. Of the legacies of care that have sustained our people. Of the future ancestors we can step up to become.

Each day began with a quiet moment to reflect. The daily journal prompts posted to Black Storytelling Week’s Instagram and Threads invited us to unearth and capture stories from the past, as well as seed our desires for our families' futures. You can always find or revisit them in our IG highlights. For mine, I dreamed up a new tradition, imagining how we might come together if money and conflict were no object, eventually landing on some small steps that I can take today.

During the “Who Raised You?” Storytelling Circle, we reminisced about the grandparents who stepped in; the loved ones who made their homes safe landing pads; the friends who offered affection when we faced the opposite. We expressed gratitude for the angels, spirits and ancestors who’ve protected and guided us, and shared the lessons nature and our bodies have taught us. We even conceived new ideas for gathering our BSW community (can anybody say… retreat?!).

The very next day, I called my grandma in Georgia, my last remaining grandparent. She’s the second oldest of 11 and I’ve only met a handful of her siblings. Nine are still with us, and they’re spread across the country: Detroit, Texas, Alabama, Los Angeles. So many branches to climb, roots to explore, kin to connect with. Grandma told me a little about each sibling, but her memory is fading. I did learn that her stepfather was a mechanic and owned his own shop in Selma, which made me think of my cousin/Grandma’s grandson/her stepfather’s great-grandson who’s followed a similar path in Virginia. I love connecting intergenerational dots like that.

Then, later in the week at our NYC Celebration at Weeksville Heritage Center, we witnessed families take their first portrait and elders record their voices for the first time. We saw friends deepen their intimacy, couples document their love, and siblings remember their parents and communities. One woman, Ms. Jolly, archived her family’s lineage going back to president John Polk in a zine, complete with birth certificates, photos and other documents. It was a dream!

What’s next for Black Storytelling Week

While the holiday has passed, we look forward to continuing to hold space for those of us doing this work.

• RSVP: Our Next Convening

  Join us Wednesday, October 22 from 7-8:30pm ET! Our Convenings are an opportunity to connect with other folks doing family history work (genealogy, family storytelling, preservation, etc), learn from one another, and share best practices and resources. Whether you’re just getting started or decades deep, this space is for you.

RSVP

• Invitation: Join our Directory

  We’re assembling a directory of family history keepers and their work or projects. Complete the survey to join.

🤎 Martina

With so many ways to celebrate, not knowing where to start can keep us from starting at all. At the end of the day, the goal of Black Storytelling Week is to cultivate stronger intergenerational bonds. So if you need to, keep it simple:

• Call or visit an elder. Ask them about a hobby or skill they have, and how they first got into it.

• If you have children in your life, show them photos of you at their age, or photos you have with them when they were younger.

You’ll be surprised what might unfold. Either way, you’ll have planted a seed. 🌱

Other Ways to Celebrate

• Join us for our first ever community celebrations! First join us for, "Who Raised You?" A Storytelling Circle on Wednesday, Sept. 10 at 7pm ET. Think a virtual campfire - a cozy space to honor the people, places and beings who shaped the person you are. Then, if you’re in NYC, stop by our in-person celebration at Weeksville Heritage Center* on Saturday, Sept. 13! We’ve got free arts workshops for all families and all ages, including family portraits, oral histories, zine-making, and more.

• Check in with us each day on Instagram and Threads for daily reflection prompts. Use them to journal, create, or spark conversation. This work is soul work; carve out some time to tend to yours.

And as always, download our Conversation Guide for activities, questions and helpful tips to kickstart and navigate family history conversations.

Wishing you a fruitful holiday,

Martina

* This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) and Made possible with the generous assistance of New York Live Arts.

We are the next generation of culture keepers, tasked with the sacred responsibility of bridging the past and future, of carrying on our precious history and traditions, and creating new ones.

Black Storytelling Week is a celebration to unite Black families — whether they’re adopted or blood, play or chosen — through intergenerational storytelling and oral tradition.

In 2025, it kicks off this upcoming Sunday, September 7 and runs until Saturday, September 13!

This holiday is a chance to discover, honor, and preserve the stories about the people and places that came before us. It’s an opportunity to bask in the present and form new memories with our loved ones. Finally, it’s a call to imagine new futures for our families, and to become the future ancestors our future kin deserve.

We are excited to support you with three ways to celebrate this year:

On Your Own

This work is soul work, and sometimes you just need to tend to yours.

Follow us on social for daily reflective prompts. Use them to journal, create, or to spark conversation once you’re ready.

Instagram

Threads

With Your Loved Ones

Whether adopted, blood, or chosen, family is family. The ones who raise, love on, nurture, and care for us - that is who you are meant to celebrate this holiday with.

Download our conversation guide — complete with tips and activities to kickstart and navigate family history conversations, then plan to get together with your people.

CONVERSATION GUIDE

In Broader Community

This year we’ve organized our first ever community celebrations! Connect with other folks keeping their family history, and get your family involved.

"Who Raised You?" Storytelling Circle

A virtual storytelling circle about the people, beings and places that shaped who we are.

Wednesday, September 10

7-9pm ET

Online

RSVP + SIGN UP

NYC Celebration at Weeksville Heritage Center

We’ve partnered with NATAL to host a day of free family arts workshops, including family portraits, oral histories, zine-making, and more!*

Saturday, September 13

12-5pm ET

Brooklyn, NY

REGISTER

* This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) and Made possible with the generous assistance of New York Live Arts.

The world tells us to forget, to move on, to leave behind what came before.

But we know better.

We know that our stories are maps, keys and blueprints to our past and to our future. We know that our history is a well of knowledge and power.

We know that our ability to thrive is intrinsically tied to our ability to remember.

We know that we must go back and go fetch it.

In the last year I stepped into a new role in my family: funeral program maker. My family has experienced a string of losses, and organizing the ​​programs has become a special way for me to honor my transitioned loved ones and experience the fullness of their lives in a new way. Collecting photos, editing obituaries, selecting poems and readings - there are so many ways to pass down history.

As Black Storytelling Week 2025 approaches, I invite you and your family to create a new tradition: make time to discover, share, and preserve stories about the people and places you come from. We’re all we’ve got and all we need.

🤍 Martina

How to Celebrate

Mark your calendar

This year, BSW runs September 7-13.

Add to Your Calendar

Download our guides

Use our conversation guide to plan an activity with your family and checkout Austen Smith’s tips for navigating conversations with elders.

Download our Conversation Guide

Gather with the BSW Community

Join us for our first ever Black Storytelling Week community celebrations!

"Who Raised You?" Storytelling Circle

A virtual storytelling circle about the people, beings and places that raised us.

Wednesday, September 10

7-9pm ET

Online

RSVP + SIGN UP

NYC Celebration at Weeksville Heritage Center

We’ve partnered with NATAL to host a day of free family arts workshops!*

Saturday, September 13

12-5pm ET

Brooklyn, NY

REGISTER

* This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) and Made possible with the generous assistance of New York Live Arts.

Our next convening is next Wednesday, July 23 - remember to RSVP!

We’ll be joined by Lisa Y. Henderson, who will draw from her decades of experience to share advice, insights and best practices for your genealogical work, including: how to get started, navigating ethical questions, how to organize and store your findings, and more.

With deep roots in North Carolina and Virginia, Lisa’s interest in genealogy was sparked by a fifth-grade family tree project and burst into flame when she discovered census records on microfilm in her university library. She holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School and is a recently retired attorney. Lisa has researched hundreds of African-American families across the Southern United States, with a special focus on eastern North Carolina. She maintains three genealogy and history blogs – North Carolina Free People of Color, Scuffalong  (personal genealogy), and Black Wide-Awake (African-American families and history of Wilson County, N.C.) – and spearheads Lane Street Project, a grassroots effort to reclaim and restore three African-American cemeteries in Wilson, N.C.

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See you soon!

Martina

I hope you’re all doing well, staying cool, and taking care.

With Juneteenth approaching, I’ve been meditating on time, and our relationship to it.

This holiday exists because freedom was delayed - emancipation on hold as our ancestors in Galveston, Texas toiled for two extra years under a system that relegated their bodies, and thus their time, to property. From the field, to the factory, to the office place, as long as African-descended people have lived on this land, our time has not been our own. Forced to become machines, stripped of the rest and leisure humanness requires. And so, as I look forward to a day off, I am inclined to resist the ways in which time is weaponized - against our minds, and our bodies.

This email has been in the back of my mind and top of my to-do list for several weeks now. With each passing week, my guilt for not finishing and sending it has only grown. I take my commitments to Black Storytelling Week and you all seriously, and struggled to give myself grace, even as my well-being demanded my attention. The anticipation of Juneteenth has gently called me in, encouraging me to release the shame of not always having it together, of needing to sometimes put one ball down.

In a world designed to destroy Black lives, self-care becomes an act of self-preservation*. And so it’s in this spirit that I invite you to do the same this holiday. In lieu of a convening this month, I am calling us all to reclaim and explore a new relationship with our time, one rooted in restoration, refusal, and remembrance. Where rest is a right, where our care is the most urgent thing, and where we honor our lineage by doing WTF we want. Here are some ideas:

• Block 24 hours on your calendar to only do things that bring you joy (and take it a step further by turning off your phone, or notifications);

• Say “no” to something you don’t want to do;

• Slow down your morning or nighttime routine to 2-3 hours;

• Use PTO to extend the holiday into a long weekend;

• Read this incredible piece by Rasheedah Phillips on the link between Juneteenth and time.

Afterwards, I'd love to hear about your experience. What came up for you? Where did you feel challenged? In what ways did you feel a release? Reply to this email and let me know.

Warmly,

Martina

Our Next Convening: July 23 at 7pm EDT

Mark your calendars and RSVP for our July convening. The conversation will focus on how to organize, store and preserve your findings for safe keeping. We’ll convene again in August in preparation for Black Storytelling Week!

RSVP

Missed our Last Convening? Catch the Replay

In April, Austen Smith led us through a lovely discussion about navigating tender conversations with elders, Najah Hylton presented her Living Legacy Exhibit initiative, and we announced the BSW directory. Watch the replay (Passcode: Nad?g3Q=) and download Austen’s best practices for engaging elders.

Calls to Action

• Invitation: Join our Directory

  Let’s get to know each other! We’re assembling a directory of family history keepers, their work or projects, and skills to offer. Complete this form to join.

• Request for feedback: Living Legacy Exhibit

  At our last convening, Najah shared her plans to create a Living Legacy Exhibit template for families to honor living or transitioned kin. Take some time to review them; She’d love your feedback via this survey.

* Audre Lorde famously wrote, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." in the epilogue of her 1988 collection of essays, A Burst of Light.

Our April convening is quickly approaching on April 30 - this is a friendly reminder RSVP.

The theme: how to navigate tender conversations with elders. Our discussion will be led by Austen Smith.

Austen (they/them) is an ancestor-in-training, writer, and independent researcher with roots in Kentucky that extend back to the 1850s. They run ImaginationDoulas, a spirit-led creative education platform that centers on ancestral reverence, dreamwork, and the creative process. They have over two decades of experience in storytelling, genealogical research, qualitative research, caregiving for both young and elderly individuals, spiritual guidance, archiving, and community organizing. Austen's work focuses on the creative and spiritual wealth of Black folks and the African Diaspora.

RSVP

See you soon!

Martina

Spring is here, and we’re grateful for your patience as we followed up on our first convening!

We walked away affirmed, inspired, and energized by the possibilities of coming together to learn and grow.

A Quick Recap: What We Need Most

If you joined late, here’s the slide deck we shared, including a brief history of Black Storytelling Week.

From our discussion, three key areas stood out where folks need the most support:

✨ Navigating tender conversations

✨ Organizing and storing discoveries

✨ Sharing stories with family members

Our upcoming gatherings will dig into these topics, starting with our next convening.

Mark Your Calendar: Next Convening – April 30 at 7 PM ET

Our theme for April is how to encourage elders to open up and navigate tender conversations.

RSVP

Based on your survey responses and our capacity, we’ll gather every other month through the rest of the year.

A Community Ask

Do you have experience getting elders to open up? We’d love your insight in shaping or facilitating this next discussion. Reply to this email if you’re interested in contributing!

See you soon!

To those who shared feedback on our game, and helped clarify the kinds of resources needed to exchange stories across generations: Thank you.

It's been an unpredictable ride... and it’s only just beginning.

Though we've been very active this year, as a coalition, we weren’t able to properly celebrate Black Storytelling Week 2024.

Between stepping up as caretakers, rebuilding after natural disaster, and other ways that life lifes, we pushed forward to build on last year’s celebration and launch a card game, but faced a tough choice: rush to get something out for 2024, or take our time and build with intentionality and wellness at the forefront.

You can probably guess what won.

In speaking with archivists, historians, potential game players, and game developers— we realized our coalition needs more strength and support to accomplish what we’re aiming for - to preserve our history and kindle intergenerational healing and connections.

So, we are determined to secure these relationships and resources, beginning with planting this ask:

Here’s what we need over the next year to grow this initiative -

1. Coalition Building 🫱🏾‍🫲🏿

   We are looking to partner with community organizations to promote the holiday and activate families to celebrate.

2. Consulting Folks Who Do This 🧠

   We cannot gloss over the blocks keeping families from coming together. We want to work with culturally competent, trauma-informed therapists and historians to ensure that our intentions and impact for the game and experiences we curate align.

3. Fundraising 💰

   We are raising funds to compensate these experts for their time, to support promotion, events and programming, and to pay ourselves.

4. Never Stop Learning 📖

   There’s so much more to learn! About those already doing this work, more about what people need to comfortably exchange stories, and about how we can safely hold space for one another. This means asking a lot more questions and giving ourselves a bit more time.

If you, or anyone you know, might be able to connect us to the above resources, please do reply.

Before we go, we encourage you to find time this weekend to connect with family and share stories about your people and where they come from. Year round, our conversation guide remains a resource available on our website.

Thank you so much, everyone, and Happy Black Storytelling Week!  We hope you and your family share at least one good story.

Peace,

The Black Storytelling Week Coalition