Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Mama Phife Represents: Hybrid Memoir

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In this intimate collection, award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest.

Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother’s grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments show a great love between mother and son. Both elegy and praise song, this is a narrative encompassing joy,sorrow, healing, and a mother’s triumphant heart that rises and blooms again. 

“An elegy, an epic, a duet. A motherhand gathering the lastings. We are so utterly fortunate to witness this immense devotion, and in that witnessing be changed by yet another glimpse of deepest love and what it makes possible.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet and workshop facilitator. The recipient of the 2015 Barnes and Noble Writers For Writers Award, she is the founder and curator of the Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival. In her community, she has judged poetry entries to New York Foundation for the Arts and Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice; and facilitated poetry workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. A VONA fellow, her work has been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Pluck!, Killings Journal of Arts & Letters, and Adrienne. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

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Cheryl Boyce-Taylor:

Mama Phife Represents

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