By Erin Wood
In January’s article, I shared that textile artist, poet, and regular contributor to Wednesday Night Poetry, Crystal C. Mercer, was finishing work on an EP, Black Glow Matters, as well as a related short film. On May 17, both were released. (Also, in May, Mercer was notified that she’d received coveted grants from PEN America and the Dramatist Guild Foundation, both of which are helping her continue her charge as a storyteller.)
Black Glow Matters is now streaming everywhere. I listened through Apple Music as the voice of Mercer’s father, the late attorney and civil rights activist Christopher C. Mercer Jr., was layered with Mercer’s own, along with crashing waves, bold beats, and valorous narratives from the shores of Ghana where she lived in 2018. The album is a unique combination of oral history and melody that cannot be missed.
About the release, Mercer shares, “The Poetry EP and the short film, which share the same name, are about lineage and legacy. This a story about honoring the ancestors, raising the dead even, paying homage to those who have paved a path of resistance and resilience. A story of survival, sensuality, and illuminating from the inside out. Black Glow Matters is about a cotton blossom of a girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, who fully blooms into her freedom in Accra, Ghana.”
Mercer’s book, A Love Story Waiting to Happen (Butterfly Typeface, 2019), is available from local and national retailers, and she is reading from her latest collection, Riot, which she hopes to publish this year. She is currently hand-stitching the panels which will become her first children’s book From Cotton to Silk: The Magic of Black Hair (forthcoming from Et Alia Press in November). Follow her on Instagram at @mercertextilemercantile to see the panels revealed as they are completed.
A Hot Springs native, Erin Wood is a writer, editor, and publisher in Little Rock. She owns and runs Et Alia Press (etaliapress.com). Wood is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives (April, 2019) and editor of and a contributor to Scars: An Anthology (2015).
