Healing Our Stories: Sharing Black Women’s Narratives

Join the editor and several contributors to the ground-breaking anthology We Deserve to Heal: Black Women on the Perils & Promises of Friendship with White Women (publication date February 24, 2026). Hear the heart behind this project and the hope these writers have for the healing work this book is bringing to pass.

Registration is required at the Zoom link.
https://cmlibrary.zoom.us/meeting/register/xsjXfnH9TyONRXRRTBN1BQ

Before the event, you can read the We Deserve to Heal illustrated companion essay.

Authors who will be present:

Patrice Gopo is an award-winning essayist who writes words that touch wounds and speak to the hope of healing. Her essay collections include Autumn Song, recipient of the inaugural Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award, and All the Colors We Will See, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Patrice lives with her family in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she enjoys walks just after dawn and thinks a perfect day ends with ice cream. Find her online at patricegopo.com.

Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein is Assistant Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Theological Imagination and associate professor in Black religious traditions and constructive theology and ethics at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. Her creative and scholastic work engages liminal identity and faith, American African explorations in womanism, theopoetics, constructive theology, and social ethics. She is the author of The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice, coeditor of Theopoetics in Color: Embodied Approaches in Theological Discourse, and the author of a forthcoming work on the theological ethics of care. Visit her website tomioredein.com for more.

Deidra Riggs is a writer, speaker, and spiritual strategist who tells the truth with tenderness. Her work invites readers to come home to themselves and to the sacred beauty of everyday life. She is the author of several books, including Every Little Thing and One: Unity in a Divided World, and her essays often explore the intersections of faith, family, memory, and personal freedom. Deidra lives in Connecticut, where she honors the small things that shape a life—and chooses with care what to carry forward, and what to let go. Follow her on Instagram @deidrariggs or visit her website, [DeidraRiggs.com](http://deidrariggs.com/ "http://deidrariggs.com").

Kadeisha M. Bonsu is a God-chaser, wife, and mother. By vocation she is a psychotherapist and ordained minister, but by design she is a spiritual midwife, racial reconciler, cultural translator, and wounded healer. Kadeisha is a lover of words, written and embodied, and through those creative gifts, she communicates healing. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir about the intersections of motherhood, faith, and mental health. You can learn more about her at kadeishabonsu.com.