Dear God,
I stand in gratitude for the grace and mercy covering my life. Keep, abeg, guiding my hands and heart so I stumble well. Let me write (and live) a better story than the one I wrote yesterday. InshaAllah, let the largeness of this work inspire me to extend and expand to meet the many moments needed to write us well and always from a space of tribute and tenderness. Bless all the bearers of words that made and continue to make me. Bless the reader of this prayer that they may rest in the peace of their path. Thank you for the love and wonder of this life.
With all my heart,
—Té
Hey!
I’m Té…a writer, educator, speaker, and facilitator interested in Black life and the many ways Blackness meets, shapes, questions, and survives the world around it.
Throughout this site, you’ll find my writing, community work, workshops, speaking, and ongoing projects, along with ways to invite me into your organization, classroom, fellowship, conference, or community.
Thanks for spending a little time here. (Full bio on about page.)
I hope, wherever you are, you’re being kind to yourself.
Here We Are, Reflections of a God Gone Mad (2012) is a search for God marked by faith, anger, tenderness, & survival. Across this semi-autobiographical collection, which is alternately funny, brash, intimate, and deeply reflective, God is sought, questioned, accused, abandoned, and called upon again. Smith writes toward the difficult territory between devotion and disappointment: the rage of praying into silence, the emotional violence committed in the name of religion, and the wounds carried from childhood into adulthood. Here We Are, Reflections of A God Gone Mad examines what it means to carry trauma in one hand and hope in the other, and still dare to call that reaching prayer. (This is a reprint)