Jessica P. Pryde > Quotes

“How do you sustain the love and confidence you’ve been given growing up when you’re awkward and clumsy and everything you love repeatedly reinforces a specific standard of beauty?”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“Though the story sounds like a myth because it’s dressed in tales of heroic soldiers and kingdoms, Cole is really modeling how ideologies truly function in society. She has given the kingdom of Njaza a controlling image of women, an ideologically driven stereotype that provides justification for the existing social relations. Controlling images, according to sociologist and leading Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins, provide cover, making it seem that the way things are is how they should be.”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“Over 90 percent of the books offered by traditional publishers in the romance genre are not about Black people in race or experience.”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“Fiona Zedde’s entire body of work), and Alyssa Cole’s body of work (Once Ghosted, Twice Shy and How to Find a Princess). There is sporadic representation of bi Black women, such as Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown. The self-published options, however, are broader. There’s Chencia C. Higgins’s Things Hoped For and Consolation Gifts, Meka James’s Being Hospitable, J. Nichole’s A Girl Like Me, Christina C. Jones’s Something Like Love, and G. L. Tomas’s Wander This World and The Love Bet.”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“There is sporadic representation of bi Black women, such as Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown. The self-published options, however, are broader. There’s Chencia C. Higgins’s Things Hoped For and Consolation Gifts, Meka James’s Being Hospitable, J. Nichole’s A Girl Like Me, Christina C. Jones’s Something Like Love, and G. L. Tomas’s Wander This World and The Love Bet. Still, this isn’t enough.”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“Ann Allen Shockley was a librarian, journalist, novelist, and literary critic. Shockley’s romance novels Loving Her and Say Jesus and Come to Me, alongside her short story collection, The Black and White of It,”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“As if there were no queer Black people. As if I did not exist. But then I found books by Rebekah Weatherspoon. And then Alyssa Cole. And then Brooklyn Wallace. And then Talia Hibbert. And then Chencia C. Higgins. And Fiona Zedde.”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“Keckley, Elizabeth Hobbs, 1818–1907. Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868.”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“In my book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, I define Desire/ability to complicate how we understand Desire—and thus, the structural violence of both Beauty and Ugliness:”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters

“I was surprised to learn that Harper had written one of the earliest romance novels, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted,”
― Jessica P. Pryde, Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happy Ever Afters