The Ruby is proud to welcome Lyzette Wanzar for a reading and discussion about her newest book, TRUAMA, TRESSES & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative. Lyzette Wanzer will be joined by Ruby Camilla Griffiths in conversation.
This event will include a conversation, short reading, and Q&A. Books will be available for purchase at the event from our friends at Dog Eared Books!
About TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH
"Trauma, Tresses, & Truth offers vivid vignettes of individual and collective episodic memory. There is an urgent need for collective healing that invites Black and Brown women to tell their stories from the crown down. Trauma, Tresses, & Truth seeks to unseat and decolonize our natural hair stories, redirecting entire eras of grief Into rediscovery, rebirth, and reclamation of our ability to choose our hair stories." -Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka, founder and CEO of PsychoHairapy
Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military squadrons, Black and Afro Latina natural hair continues to confound, transfix, and enrage members of White American society. Why, in 2024, is this still the case? Why have we not moved beyond that perennial racist emblem? And why are women so disproportionately affected?
Why does our hair become most palatable when it capitulates, and has been subjugated, to resemble Caucasian features as closely as possible? Who or what is responsible for the web of supervision and surveillance of our hair? Who in our society gets to author the prevailing constitution of professional appearance?
Particularly relevant during this time of emboldened White supremacy, racism, and provocative othering, this work explores how writing about one of the still-remaining systemic biases in schools, academia, and corporate America might lead to greater understanding and respect.
"With care, passion, honesty, and insightfulness, Trauma, Tresses, and Truth takes readers on a beautiful journey about Black women's hair. Each chapter in this thought-provoking and at times heartbreaking collection invites the reader to learn and unlearn about Blackness, white supremacy, class, and surveillance. A must-read for all invested in understanding what the ongoing subjugation of Black women looks like today." -Treva B. Lindsey, PhD, author of America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice and Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, DC
"These collective episodes explicitly expose the struggles that women of color endure in the many places where their natural hair has been weaponized against them. These real-life emotional experiences increase awareness about a form of systemic racism that is shocking to many; it also challenges readers to respect all hair types, a healing quest." — Library Journal
About Lyzette Wanzer
Lyzette Wanzer is a San Francisco writer, editor, and writing workshop instructor. Her work appears in over thirty literary journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Library Journal named her book, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives, a Top 10 Best Social Sciences Book. Her articles have appeared in Essay Daily, The Naked Truth, and the San Francisco University High School Journal. Her research interests include professional development for creative writers, Black feminism, critical race theory, and the lyrical essay form.
Lyzette serves as judge of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition’s Intercultural Essay category and the Women’s National Book Association’s Effie Lee Morris Writing Contest’s Fiction category. She presents her work at conferences across the country, including the American and Popular Culture Association, Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), College English Association, Desert Nights, Rising Stars (Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing), Empowering Wom[x]n of Color Conference, Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900, Grub Street’s Muse; The Marketplace, San Francisco Writers Conference, The Society for the Study of African American Life and History, and Southern Humanities Council. In August 2021 and 2023 she produced her own two-day virtual conference, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: A Natural Hair Conference, featuring panels, workshops, and readings examining the policing, perception, politics, and persecution of Black women’s natural hair.
About Camilla Griffiths
Camilla Griffiths is a behavioral scientist and public science communicator. She is trained as a social psychologist and her research primarily explores questions of racial identity and its role in shaping experiences for marginalized groups in American institutions. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2021, she has worked as a research scientist at Stanford SPARQ, a 'do-tank' that builds partnership with industry leaders and changemakers to combat bias, reduce disparities, and drive culture change. Camilla's scholarly work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary Educational Psychology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has also written about her own and others' research in opinion pieces for Scientific American and Education Week, including a 2022 piece on the scientific evidence for engaging students and children in conversations about race in schools.
With both parents working in international aid and diplomacy, Camilla grew up primarily in Eastern and Northern Africa and graduated high school in India before attending the University of Virginia for her B.S.
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