“Cousin, are you sure?” Tiffany asked me. “Aren’t you scared?” I laughed away whatever fear I was carrying and told her I would be back. That it was just for the summer. But Tiffany knew what I couldn’t see yet. That I would find writing and become the woman of my own dreams. I cloaked…
When we invited readers — as well as renowned writers such as Staceyann Chin, Mahogany Browne and Damon Young — to respond to the question “What is Black love today?” we were moved by the strength, resilience and diversity of the stories they told us. To love, or be loved, while Black in the United…
A few days before my last day at my job administering a college scholarship program, I’d received an email from someone named Dani. I’d contacted her to make an appointment, but she never showed. On my last day, as I did one final skim through my emails, I stopped at hers again. I zoomed in…
“I like you,” I told him. “I like you, too,” he replied. “No, I like you, like you,” I said. “OK fool. I know,” he said. We stared at each other for a second before going back to playing with our action figures, until my aunt said it was time for dinner. During the last…
Not only did he attend school plays, piano recitals, basketball games, track meets, even church once or twice, but he was also the one who would drive me to and from those events. Whenever I copped an attitude, he knew how to put a smile on my face. He would scoop me up and take…
“Dealmaker? GREAT SMILE! Dealbreaker? BAD TEETH!” When I was 11, and had just moved with my parents to East Lib, Pittsburgh, this brazen stubby white boy started calling me “Beaver” because of my slightly bucked teeth and perpetual overbite, and that nickname stuck. (People who know me from then still know me as “Beav.”) By…
When Denise Parnell and Whitney Hardy first encountered each other in 2009, it was on a blind date — one that Ms. Parnell was on with a man to whom she had been introduced by friends. To ease the pressure on Ms. Parnell, her friends had arranged for the setup to be part of a…
In September 2015, Henderson Moore Blumer could sense the panic of fellow art student Suzanne Zoe Joskow. She was in her first year of the M.F.A. program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles; he in his second. It was that time at the start of the semester when students begin receiving…
When Jafreen Momtaj Uddin and Shakil Sarfaroz Rabbi matched on Salams, a Muslim dating app, in June 2021, they immediately began a two-hour online conversation that Ms. Uddin described as “extremely comfortable.” “I was visiting an aunt in Philadelphia that day,” said Ms. Uddin, 36. While one of her parents drove, she exchanged messages with…
On Jan. 28, 2020, Sharon Deckey Mussalli was scrolling through Instagram when she came upon a black-and-white photo of Shaun Robert Jenkins, a senior manager of training at Tone House, a trendy gym in New York City. The photo was posted by a mutual friend on Mr. Jenkins’s birthday, and showed him in a tuxedo…