Goddess of the Whole Self by Sherrie Fernandez-Williams

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams’s starkly honest Goddess of the Whole Self is a defiant and raw portrait of the woman’s experience from body image to insomnia to middle age. Lyrical and intelligent, the poems in this collection serve as a fiercely feminist tribute to the women who came before and the women we were before. Fernandez-Williams mines history—both personal and political—to represent a life lived and living.

—Anika Fajardo Author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family

Liberation Theology:  The Remembrance of Sister June (June Jordan) reignited my love for her!  Having been reduced like soup stock, I know Juanita. Paying homage to black woman sisterhood derived from Ancestral inspiration is like food for the soul and now I know that tea is an answer! Poet, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, thank you for the freedom to recognize and honor the Goddess of my Whole Self!. 

—Lissa Jones, Culture Coach. Podcaster. Public Speaker.  Host of Black Market Reads, podcast and Urban Agenda, KMOJ Minneapolis

Goddess of the Whole Self is a celebration of a divine feminine that bridges the wonders and the wounds of womanhood. Here, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams explores embodied geographies with fertile Black grounds where ancestral stories, stories that survey “the ground where they once stood” share space and time with poems that measure “the distance between selves.”  At once deeply relational and autobiographical, her writing is salted with the sweat of real being and layered with homegrown love.

—Arleta Little, poet and writer, Executive Director of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, co-author of Hope in the Struggle, a memoir written about the life of Josie Johnson in collaboration with the Minnesots civil rights leader, and writer, Carolyn Holbrook