Special Episode - Black Maternal Health and Spoken Black Girl Magazine (Motherhood Edition) with Yaa Abbensetts-Dobson, Michele Evans, and Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas
In this special episode of Pray with our Feet podcast, Mom and I chat with Yaa Abbensetts-Dobson, Michele Evans and Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas, about the latest issue of Spoken Black Girl Magazine (which focuses on the Black motherhood experience) while also uplifting Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17) founded by Black Mamas Matter Alliance.
We dive into the urgent need for community care, creating safe spaces for Black mothers and their children, resisting the suffocation of our wombs by oppressive systems, and the vital need for rest, mindfulness and radical self care in the tradition of Audre Lorde and June Jordan; each of these practices is a sacred form of resistance, sustaining us in the ongoing work of collective liberation. We call our joy back to us, and remain rooted in our faith, despite the challenges.
Purchase your copy of Spoken Black Girl (Motherhood issue), where you can read "Swan Song," by Michele Evans, "Our Wombs Cannot Breathe: Wellness Power for Facing the Harsh Reality of Black Maternal-Child Health Disparities in the United States,”
by Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas PhD & Dr. Kyrah K. Brown PhD, “Mothering at the Intersection of Blackness and Neurodiversity” by Emelda De Coteau, alongside an array of talented writers and artists.
Stay Connected with the Writers:
Yaa Abbensetts-Dobson, founder of Spoken Black Girl and author of Departure Story
Michele Evans, author of Purl (a collection of poetry)
Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas, author of the forthcoming book entitled THE UGLY CRY: Essays and Meditations on Honesty, Anger, Grief, and Freedom. To be released Summer 2025.
Learn More about the Writers -
Yaa Abbensetts-Dobson
Yaa (Rowana) Abbensetts-Dobson (She/her/hers) is a wordsmith and editor from Brooklyn, NY. She holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Kenyon College. As a lifelong writer, she has made it her mission to help women heal through telling her own story and inspiring others to do the same. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Spokenblackgirl.com, a publication designed for women of color to share mental and emotional holistic wellness experiences.
Rowana’s journey into digital entrepreneurship has given her a specialized skill set that includes web content writing, editing, event coordination, and web design. When she’s not making waves on the web, Rowana writes short stories and is the author of Departure Story, Published by Spoken Black Girl Publishing in June 2021. She enjoys performing readings of her work as well as speaking at events and panels about women’s empowerment, wellness, and mental health. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Obsidian Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Moko Magazine, Free Verse, Late Fee, and many other publications.
As a speaker, Rowana has delivered speeches at the Black Women Writers Virtual Summit and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, NYU and Kenyon College. Spoken Black Girl was nominated for best business commercial at the Queens International Underground Film Festival and was selected as the winner of a $10,000 small business grant from the Local Initiatives Support Cooperation and Verizon. In 2022, she became a board member for the International Women's Writers Guild after winning the Livingkindness Art and Activism Award.
Michele Evans
Michele Evans, a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.), is a writer, teacher, and adviser for Unbound, an award-winning Northern Virginia high school literary magazine. This Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee studied at Smith College, King’s College London, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Artemis Journal, ASP Bulletin, Maryland Literary Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Yellow Arrow Journal, Zora's Den, and elsewhere. This Watering Hole fellow and Teacher Consultant for the Northern Virginia Writing Project lives online at www.awordsmithie.com.
purl is her first poetry collection.
Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas
Dr. Shameka Poetry Thomas, PhD is the CEO of DR. POETRYSPEAKSHEALTH, LLC, which is her very own wellness brand, launched in 2020 and features her wellness lifestyle as a traveling mother and scholar-scientist. Dr. Poetry is a trained meditation and yoga instructor, a published author, a poet, a mother, a traveler, and a generational curse-breaker! She has traveled all over the world and across all four regions of the African continent, including many cities within South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, Tanzania, Cuba, and Kenya. By day, she is also the founder of the SICKLE CELL WOMEN & GIRLS (SWAG) RESEARCH LAB, which was spearheaded during her data collection at the Ghana Institute of Clinical Genetics and the University of Ghana. Currently, she is a faculty professor and scientific investigator, whose research focuses on global health, bioethics, noninvasive prenatal testing, reproductive genetics, and sickle cell disease among mothers and children. Dr. Poetry loves the arts, dance, creative writing, and all things health and wellness. She focuses on being authentic to her soul.
She also has a forthcoming book, entitled THE UGLY CRY: Essays and Meditations on Honesty, Anger, Grief, and Freedom. To be released Summer 2025.
To learn more about her work:
-Visit her website: www.drpoetryspeakshealth.com
-Subscribe to her YouTube channel: @DRPOETRYSPEAKSHEALTH
-And feel free to also purchase her 13-year-old daughter’s children’s book, entitled THE MOON LOVES GLITTER Available for purchase on Amazon Books. All proceeds go to her daughter’s college fund.
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Special thank you to my husband Keston De Coteau, for podcast production; he is an award-winning videographer and photographer.