F
rom Beyoncé and Oprah to Serena and Venus Williams, African American women are some of the most celebrated people in today’s media-saturated culture. Despite the largely positive nature of this attention, misconceptions and stereotypes are often reinforced when we see these women on screens and in the pages of magazines. In a new book of poems contemplating celebrity, race, and representation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs considers “what it is possible to know about the most famous Black women alive today.” Gumbs describes her book, One Hundred and One Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive, as “part prayer part polemic […] an intervention into the consumption of Black women.”

