At the top of this page, you’ll see a clip of Shug Avery returning to her father’s church in The Color Purple after decades of estrangement. Reverend Avery all but disowned his daughter for being a traveling blues singer and a “loose woman.” After hearing the choir in her father’s church begin singing God Is Trying To Tell You Something, Shug picks up the tune and walks toward the church, bringing her community of Blues musicians and early-Sunday morning spectators. Shug opens the church doors and stands before her father in a moment of praise and worship, where their worlds and communities merge. They lock eyes and she runs to embrace him, whispering in his ear, “See Daddy? Sinners have soul, too.” 

I chose this moment to welcome you into The Library of Black Wellness because it captures the essence of this project: reconciliation, love, and healing, and how those things often happen most profoundly in community. 

The Library of Black Wellness is a curated, evolving archive of Black care. It’s built around two intertwined threads: the source material and the works and conversations that frame or contextualize it, helping us understand why it matters, how it has moved through time, and what it continues to teach us. You’ll find literature, news reporting, academic research, oral history, and recorded conversations here. You’ll find fiction that explores grief, healing, and well-being more deeply than any medical text. You’ll find oral traditions that preserve ancestral knowledge. You’ll find journal articles documenting the real-life impacts of Black healing practices.

Here, trends don’t define wellness, nor is it discussed as it is currently understood. Instead, the Library defines wellness through a cultural and communal lens by focusing on a fuller spectrum of Black life: how we survive, how we grieve, how we heal, how we love, how we care for each other, and how we make joy possible. Many of the works in this archive aren’t typically shelved under “wellness.” But read closely, and you’ll find rich narratives of care, healing, and survival. Toni Morrison’s Sula is about friendship, betrayal, and autonomy, but it also shows how Black women live through grief and shape each other’s healing. Whether in essays or poetry, Audre Lorde’s writing reveals how self-care is political and how community care is liberatory. Parable of the Sower is a visionary exploration of resilience amid chaos and the radical necessity of building care networks that nurture healing and collective strength. 

Nearly every work in this library returns to the collective. Black wellness has never been only an individual pursuit. It’s something we’ve always done in relationship to one another. That’s why public submissions about Black wellness across the diaspora are vital to this Library’s future—I can’t do this alone and don’t want to.

The Library of Black Wellness is a space to remember what we already know. At its core, this library exists to honor and preserve the traditions, strategies, and insights Black people have used to heal, protect, and sustain ourselves across generations. By collecting and celebrating these works, we safeguard ancestral wisdom and help build futures where rest, resistance, and joy are our birthright. 

We are our own best thing. 

—  Julia Craven