In celebration of Black History Month, we’ll be highlighting a diverse range of books – poetry, novels, memoirs and more – all written by Black American authors. Each of these works moved, engaged, delighted, enraged, and excited Island Free Library readers’ this past year, and we’ll be featuring one title every day through the month of February.
Today’s work is Nichole Perkin’s Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be, a memoir of collected essays that are as funny and memorable as they are pointed and insightful. Documenting her growing-up years and her coming-of-age as a Southern Black woman, Perkins unpacks the role of pop culture and its influence on her life at large: more specifically, she assesses the ways that dating apps, the comedy Frazier, romantic novels and many other structural mores shaped her life. Witty, sharp and always incisive, Perkins work asks herself and us as readers to interrogate systems we exist inside of, to notice how they limit “how happy we could be.”
Nichole Perkins is a poet, author, and the host of This Is Good For You, a podcast about the pursuit of pleasure. Perkins also previously co-hosted fan-favorite podcast Thirst Aid Kit, and The Waves. Perkins is from Nashville, TN, but currently lives and writes in Brooklyn, where she is working on a romance novel. Stay tuned for a new book tomorrow!
