This month’s Book Club post is a little different. Instead of reflecting on a book I’ve read, I’m sharing a book I’ve written.
My latest chapbook, Legacy: A Collection of Poems, grew out of a long, quiet process of learning, unlearning, and sitting with uncomfortable truths. It reflects my discovery of the African American experience after immigrating to the United States as a preteen in the early 1990s—and how learning about the transatlantic slave trade reshaped the way I see history, identity, and my place in the world today.
If you’d like to read Legacy, it’s available here:
👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GM7KDDDV
Coming to the U.S. and Learning What I Didn’t Know
When I arrived in the United States, I came with my own sense of self, culture, and history. Like many immigrants, I was focused on adapting—learning how to belong, how to succeed, how to survive in a new place. What I didn’t yet understand was how deeply history lived beneath everyday life here.
It wasn’t until later—through school, conversations, reading, and lived experience—that I began to truly grasp the scope and brutality of the slave trade and its lasting impact on African Americans. That knowledge didn’t arrive all at once. It unfolded slowly, and with it came grief, anger, confusion, and a profound shift in my worldview.
Legacy was born from that reckoning.
What Legacy Holds
This chapbook is not an attempt to speak for anyone. It is a record of how learning this history changed me—how it complicated my understanding of freedom, resilience, inheritance, and responsibility.
The poems explore:
- the weight of historical truth
- the distance and connection between African and African American experiences
- what it means to arrive somewhere without fully knowing its past
- how knowledge reshapes identity
- and how history continues to echo through the present
Writing these poems required me to slow down and listen—to history, to voices that came before me, and to my own evolving understanding.
Why This Book Matters to Me Now
Legacy represents a turning point in my writing. It’s where reflection met accountability. Where curiosity met responsibility. Where I stopped looking away from discomfort and allowed it to inform how I move through the world.
This book is about inheritance—not just of trauma, but of truth. And about what we do once we know better.
A Quiet Invitation
I’m sharing Legacy here because this Book Club space has always been about reflection and growth. If you choose to read it, I hope it invites you to pause, to consider history more closely, and to reflect on how knowledge shapes compassion.
Some books entertain.
Some educate.
And some simply ask us to sit with what we’ve learned.
Legacy is that kind of book for me.
Luluisthatgirl 