Elemental Blackness

A powerful meditation on Blackness, ancestry and the natural world.

'Rhapsodic and incantatory, multi-layered and spiritually-rich, Elemental Blackness is a beautifully-written genre-buster.' — Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

In Elemental Blackness: Black Liberation and the Natural World, Cherise Morris weaves poetry, memoir, prayer and cultural criticism into a bold, genre-defying exploration of what it means to be Black in America.

Organised around the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, the book traces the deep connections between racial oppression and environmental destruction. From the legacy of the Middle Passage to the Flint water crisis, from rural Virginia to Detroit’s urban farms, Morris examines how Black communities have been shaped by histories of dispossession, violence and ecological harm, while also reclaiming the natural world as a source of memory, resistance and healing.

Drawing on African diasporic spiritual traditions, ancestral cosmologies and her own lived experience, Morris moves fluidly between lyric essay, ritual, prayer and memoir to ask urgent questions about freedom, belonging and survival in a world marked by climate crisis and racial injustice.

Winner of the inaugural Global Black Women’s Non-Fiction Manuscript Prize, chaired by Bernardine Evaristo, Elemental Blackness announces the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in contemporary nonfiction.