Soul Survivors
LeConté Dill

Soul Survivors consists of three sections of persona poems where each storyteller introduces themselves—their neighborhoods, families, friends, activities, thoughts, and feelings—speaking to whomever can and will listen. LaChelle hails from East Oakland, CA, April is from the Pittsburgh neighborhood in Southwest Atlanta, GA, and Naima was born and raised in East Flatbush Brooklyn, NY. These girls’ communities and lives have been shaped by political, economic, and social changes to their neighborhoods and schools and by personal and community practices of hope and healing. The fictionalized speakers are all teenagers, yet the book implores adult readers to mentally and emotionally explore this real-life complex navigation along with the characters.

Informed by fifteen years of the author’s ethnographic research in and with these neighborhoods and the young people and community organizations there, the girls’ poetic voices and verses in Soul Survivors offer more than what traditional research, programming, policy, and media reports can hold. The book interrogates the research literature on adolescent resilience, including the author’s own, because for urban Black girls, resilience is not a goal, but a given. Therefore, Soul Survivors re-presents what strategies Black girls, and their villages, are enacting on a daily basis beyond resilience and beyond survival.

LeConté Dill is the author of Building a Maker Outta Me (Third World Press, forthcoming). She was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California, the eldest grandchild of four sojourners of the Second Wave of the Great Migration. She is a storyteller, artist, educator, and community-accountable scholar. LeConté is a proud Spelman alumna and holds graduate degrees from UCLA and UC Berkeley. LeConté currently guides, creates, and learns with students, fellow faculty, and community members as the Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her work is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community organizers, policy advocates, and health educators at community-based organizations and public health departments across the U.S. and South Africa. In her research, art, teaching, and advocacy, she aims to listen to and show up for Black girls, in particular, and is committed to documenting their/our strategies of wellness, healing, and resistance. Her writing has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as  POETRY, the Du Bois Review, Feminist Anthropology, Mom Egg Review, and Health Promotion Practice. 

Soul Survivors
by LeConté Dill
Copublished with np:
5.5 x 8.5, 112 pgs., $22
ISBN 978-1-962365-12-3
Forthcoming in 2026.