DARNELL L. MOORE
“No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America”
What happens to the black boys who come of age in neglected, heavily policed, and economically desperate cities that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration have created? How do they learn to live, love, and grow up? Where should they turn when history rejects their very existence? Darnell explores these questions in NO ASHES IN THE FIRE. When Darnell Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they assumed he was gay, and poured gasoline on him. He barely escaped with his life. On many other occasions there were terrifying confront-ations, including some within his family…
Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer and activist, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tireless advocate for justice and liberation. No Ashes in the Fire is his compelling Account of how that bullied, frighteneed teenager not only survived, but found such a unique calling. He traces his life from his childhood in Camden, New Jersey, a city famously scarred by uprisings and repression, to his search for intimacy in the gay gathering places in Philadelphia, and finally to movements in Newark, Brooklyn, and Ferguson, where he could openly fight for others who survive on society’s edges. An editor-at-large at the content distributor Urban One, and a columnist at Logo, Darnell L. Moore describes his bold, candid memoir as “snapshots of my life” molded by forces of “brutality, poverty, and self-hatred.”
Darnell L. Moore (born in 1976 in Camden, NJ) is an American writer and activist whose work is characterized by anti-racist, feminist, queer, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. His essays, social commentary, poetry and interviews have appeared ion various national and international media venues, including The Feminist Wire, Ebony Magazine, and The Huffington Post.
Moore’s scholarship focuses broadly on Black Theology and Black Christian thoought that is inclusive of queer subjectivities. He has published essays in Black Theology, Theology & Sexuality: An International Journal, and Pneuma: The Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies.
