The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful

Afrofuturist memoir on jazz, collaboration, and the search for collective well-being

Green Latern Press, University of Minnesota Press

November 1, 2022; 272 pages, hardback

Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that are integral to the collective survival of our planet.

BOOKS by Nicole Mitchell Gantt