written on January 20, 2025

I woke up today surprisingly calm. 

The sun was shining, it was warm—maybe a little too warm—but as I went about the routine of my day, despite everything, I was calm. Maybe it’s the existential dread I’ve felt for the past several years merging into my subconscious and not being able to distinguish it or even mask it. Maybe it’s the burgeoning Afro-pessimist in me coming to terms with the rooted anti-Blackness within this country’s soil. Maybe it’s the insistent radical optimist who refuses to sit in despair for too long and is actively plotting new ways of being, imagining, and living amid hellfire. 

However, rather than linger in doom and apathy, I am going to live. I refuse to be silenced, ignored, or even snuffed out. I refuse to stay in a perpetual state of victimhood. I’m over it.

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shawn williams is an Afrofuturist poet and storyteller. Utilizing lyric, free-verse, and epistolary poetry, shawn transports readers through various modes of time, place, and history. Referencing the nostalgic past of one’s childhood with the imaginative potential of the future, shawn grapples with Black feminine subjectivity, transfeminine self-fashioning, and Afrofuturist affect, in order to foster deep reflection, resistance, and pleasure.

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