Overview

This Here Is for Our Survival is a debut poetry collection that speaks directly from the marrow of lived experience at the intersection of Blackness, masculinity, grief, love, and political awakening. These poems do not ask for permission. They confront. They testify. They linger. Rooted in personal history and sharpened by social critique, the collection moves through boyhood and manhood, intimacy and loss, desire and restraint, faith and disillusionment. The poems grapple with what it means to grow up under constant scrutiny, to be shaped by institutions that claim neutrality while extracting dignity, and to learn tenderness in a world that often mistakes it for weakness. This book is both reckoning and offering. It examines how Black bodies are read, disciplined, and desired. It interrogates the quiet violences of respectability, the cost of being palatable, and the inherited weight carried across generations. At the same time, it insists on vulnerability and connection as necessary acts of sustaining. Stylistically, the poems balance rawness with precision. The language is intentional, grounded, and unflinching. Some pieces arrive like a confession spoken too late. Others feel like a conversation you did not know you needed until it found you. Together, they form a body of work that is deeply personal and unmistakably political. This Here Is for Our Survival is for readers who seek poetry that does more than reflect the world. It challenges it. It is for those who understand that survival is not passive endurance, but an active, ongoing choice to remain human in the face of forces that demand otherwise. This collection will resonate with readers of contemporary spoken word, social justice poetry, and literary works that explore Black identity, politics, and resistance through honesty rather than abstraction. It is a powerful first book from a writer whose voice refuses to be softened or simplified.

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9781977288097

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Author Information

Jeffery C. White is an educator, researcher, and poet from Brooklyn, New York. He has taught in carceral, college, and K-12 classrooms, treating teaching as ethnography; a daily discovery of how people learn, heal, and build capacity together. His practice is grounded in racial equity and liberatory learning that lives beyond policy into the small, durable moves of a real room. His scholarship examines mass incarceration, reentry, and the quiet routines through which power organizes everyday life. His poems lean toward witness and repair, listening for where love and memory meet principled refusal. He is shaped by the thoughts of James Baldwin, Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), W.E.B. Du Bois and Black feminist scholars who made study a communal act and a civic duty. He begins a Sociology PhD in the Fall of 2025.

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