an invitation into the [daughter]work

announcing a new publication and inviting you into a creative practice of integration. welcome to daughterwork: a collective storytelling archive.

“In the intervening time when I have extended myself beyond my reach and come toppling humpty-dumpty-down on my face in full view of a scornful world, I have returned to my mother to be liberated by her one more time”

—Maya Angelou, Foreword, Double Stitch.

are you doing your work, daughter?

In 2024, on a sunny October afternoon in Detroit, my partner RJ and I sat across the table from each other at They Say, splitting an order of fried-hard buffalo wings. In the middle of one of our many tangents, he said, “You are exactly who your mother wanted you to be,” and it sent me into a spiral. I don’t think that’s true. But was it? I, who had made so many mistakes, so publicly? She gave up everything for me. Was it worth it? Had I lived up to her expectations? And what were her expectations?

My inquiries were made more painful by the fact that my beloved mother had been dead for over a decade.

With no one left to ask, I set out to answer the question for myself, and in all my digging, I found my mother. Everywhere I went, there she was. Burrowed in crevices I hadn’t dared visit, in ideas I thought were my own, in my refusals, in my grief. Her fingerprints were all over me.

It’s been well over a year since I started writing about my mother. If I’m being honest, I underestimated the emotional weight of it all, how it would tire me, embolden me, anger me, and restore me. Sometimes I went months without touching the writing, struggling to metabolize it all into something useful. Watching me struggle, RJ did what he always does: he turned to books. He gifted me Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters, and it was a balm. A quilt of stories and explorations that felt so familiar I sometimes forgot they weren’t my own. That’s when I knew, just as with all things, the work was best done in community with Black women.

study materials.

what is daughterwork?

The concept of daughterwork emerged through my study of the Black feminist tradition of motherwork, a term popularized by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought, to describe the constellation of politicized labor Black women perform under racial capitalism, patriarchy, and state violence. Motherwork names the reality of Black motherhood as equal parts preservation, negotiation, discipline, and imagination. It articulates the strategy and sacrifice required to make life possible in a society structured against it.

Daughterwork is Double Stitch’s digital contemporary—a living anthology for Black women returning to their mothers to be liberated again. A home for creative offerings (essays, prose, research papers, artwork, scripts, prayers, monologues, fictions, and short stories) that reckon with the relationship between mothers and daughters. An invitation to “all Black women for each of us is a mother or daughter or both” into the transformative work of creative autoethnography.

why now, daughter?

The question of who my mother wanted me to be became inseparable from the question of who this moment needed me to become. We’re living through multiple intersecting apocalypses, and we are being asked to meet that unraveling with more than reaction by becoming people capable of being in right relationship with ourselves, our communities, and the planet. The kind of people a liberated world will require. This publication invites us into daughterwork as a collective practice of reflection, discernment, and integration. We’re choosing what life-giving wisdom to carry into the worlds we’re building and what to leave behind to die with the one collapsing, readying ourselves for beloved community.

on ‘othermothers’ and ‘othermothering.’

Collins also theorizes the Black community tradition of “othermothers”: women who take responsibility for children who aren’t biologically theirs (and, more broadly, the communal practices that make child-rearing possible). She discusses “community othermother” traditions and how these relationships can extend into schools and mentorship as “mothering the mind.” Daughterwork aims to expand the “mother” in mother–daughter beyond biology: daughters can be shaped by aunties, neighbors, teachers, church mothers, organizers, and whole ecologies of care.

ready to get to work?

As we prepare to go live on April 11, 2026, we’re opening a call for submissions. If you’re a Black woman and you feel pulled toward daughterwork, we want your offerings. We’re inviting essays, prose, research papers, artwork, scripts, prayers, monologues, fiction, short stories, and any creative medium supportive in reckoning with the relationship between Black daughters, their mothers (and othermothers), and the worlds that shaped them. Even if that's not you, share this with a sister who has somethings to say! You’ll find the full call for submissions below.