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Learned that Akwaeke Emezi was hospitalized recently for COVID. Here's hoping for a speedy and stable recovery.

They've also revealed the cover of their upcoming memoir, Dear Senthuran, along with a letter to accompany the book, Unleashed/Dear Reader. You can hear them read it on their Instagram, with text on their website and below:

I want to write as if I am free.

If I was a different kind of writer, someone I am not, perhaps this would have been two books— one about moving through publishing, the other about moving spirit first—but these paths are not separate to me. It’s all one story; it’s all one life. This book is what I look like when I’m not translating myself to become accessible or legible, because here, I am already these things.

I want to write as if I am free; as if my people are my only readers, as if we are the ones who hold structural power, the ones for whom markets bend, the ones with resources from generational wealth, the target demographic. I want one book in my career where I didn’t have to bend or fold or capitulate because I am publishing in the United States, because I'm Black, or African, or nonhuman, or whichever part of me is considered illegible and inaccessible to whoever this industry thinks buys the most books. I want this book for the readers who know what I’m talking about. We're not often, if at all, considered enough to make a book for, not without grafting faces onto the work to make others feel included. This book will be a mirror to more people than this industry can imagine, and I want it to face us solidly. For those it might not face, I want them to grapple with reading work that doesn’t center them: work by a writer working in Black spirit theory, examining the metaphysical implications of nonhuman embodiment. I don’t think they’ll mind. Isn’t that what we expect books to do for us, to transport us?

This book is about the unfolding of a self—how I became a beast, glorious amidst death and literary success, bright in heartbreak and chronic pain, a nonhuman suffering through embodiment. It is a complement to my debut, Freshwater, in which I chose to mask, to cloak it in fiction and slip it inside something it was not because I didn’t believe the work would make it out into the world otherwise. These days, I am choosing to believe something different—that the work can exist for its own sake, breathing in the direction of Black ontology and community, a real time account of a mortal life as a storyteller.

Most of this is to say—here is something strange and raw and, I think, beautiful. Perhaps it will be cutting with its clarity; perhaps it will be swirling and opaque. Either way, I hope you enjoy reading it.

I wrote it like I was free.