we are owed

by ariana brown

Recommended by: Thomas F. James, curator of the 2024 exhibition, “Scorched Petals to Pages: Investigating Narratives at the Intersection of Image Making and Literature”.

Book Description: We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author’s childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed. asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building.