By Regular readers and longtime supporters. I told you I would come back to this newsletter when I had a date for pre-orders and a place to launch the book.
Well, I do have a release date, December 16, 2025, the Tuesday after my birthday.
And in my next email, you’ll be able to click on normal pre-order links for the book.
Over the weekend, I spliced together a rough digital draft of the book, soundtracked with the Beyonce self-titled album, and Lemonade while sitting by my window that looks out across the Potomac and some of the buildings that are part of the reason we are on this terrible global timeline.
All that’s left is formatting and pricing the print version for Ingram Spark, so that you can ask your favorite bookstore, library, and other retailers that order books by ISBN to order. And recording my audiobook. And getting some of y’all to read the book as beta readers and leave reviews on GoodReads and make Booktoks.
Right now, I have for you the front and back cover.
A Black, Queer, Feminist, Disabled, Urbanist Guide, Toolkit, and Companion for Modern Life on Earth from One of the World’s Most Notable Contemporary Urbanists and the Creator of the Black Urbanist Multimedia Platform.
We all know the rent is too damn high, and everything, from getting our hair done to eating our soul foods from across the African Diaspora, is increasingly out of reach and touch, despite being practices our ancestors perfected. And let’s not even get started with being surveilled, policed, incarcerated, denied, and killed just for who we are as Black folks.
But Kristen Jeffers doesn’t believe gentrification is inevitable, and they’re done with taking gentrification on the nose.
After years of trying to convince their urbanist colleagues to reform their publications, organizations,local governments, community groups, and even their own attitudes around cultural diversity, equity, inclusion, and the ills of gentrification, they stepped away from the global urbanism scene for awhille, wrote a maniefesto and started to test out how to live as much of their lives as they could, while preserving energy to clapback just in time.
Or maybe never, because as a Black autistic nonbinary person who has been socialized and perceived as a woman their entire lives, rest is resistance.
This workbook is the result of that necessary pause. It’s here for you as a fellow sista-sibling to learn how to embody rest as resistance, even if the rent is coming due. It’s built around their Defying Gentrification Manifesto mantra: “I can have faith, I can engage in cultivation and creativity and self-care, but I need community care, access, infrastructure, and convenience to defy gentrification.
Interactive, with workbook pages and stories from their years in urbanism, there’s something for everyone, but this one is especially for their sistas and siblings, because intersectionality is real and so is misogynoir and if that was stopped, the entire world would stop being trash
And if you want to beta read, fill out this form.
If you become a paid Patreon or Substack member, you’ll have access to the digital and audio versions along with the Typeform and Notion pages that go along with the book, on Halloween, as my own treat!
And if you want be in that initial drop, but not give Substack money, you can do it at Ko-Fi! Either way, you’ll get that advanced access to the digital version and the audiobook.
So why am I doing it this way?
It’s because of that autism and those trust issues I mentioned in the headline.
First, let me thank my medical team for sticking with science, starting the evaluation process, and going ahead and noting how my life has been evident of these things all along in my clinical notes. While it doesn’t erase the years and pain of not knowing and having to try and make sense of it all, while others have chosen not to, at least I have an answer, and I can work to adapt and ask for more accessibility.
And if only we weren’t living in a regime that is violently pushing back against everything that I am. And a publishing world that’s scared to sign off on some things and might be too late to publish others.
Not to mention, over the last ten years since I published my first book, A Black Urbanist, I have been asked a couple of times to write for a publisher, and even though I had years of blog posts, they wanted a book proposal out of me.
Book proposals for nonfiction texts are not uncommon, but they do require a lot of intense free research and writing labor, which still may result in a no.
I don’t know if perhaps that editing team (all white) could relate to me as a now diagnosed autistic, or maybe as a queer person, or a poor/broke person. But they would not understand fully what it means to be a Black North Carolinian and how their whiteness bumps up against that. Not to say that white editor doesn’t exist, I just didn’t get that energy from this white editor and publisher. Plus, sometimes the way we do things makes us scream white supremacy culture, even if that’s not what we mean. And by we I mean any of us, because this is a system and culture, not just vibes.
That book deal would have been for $7,000+ royalties. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is more than many nonfiction books sell for, but I felt like I could get more. And I feel like my research labor alone is worth more than $7000 spread over two+ years.
Plus, so much about gentrification and urbanism is in constant flux. I myself am in constant flux. And I wanted to be able to control how I showed up and how I felt about various organizations that have been doing some repair work. I didn’t want two-year-old thoughts in this book, considering how much I’ve evolved over the last 15 years of blogging.
Also, now I realize some of my strong, debilitating feelings about writing the book were due to my sensory overload and absorbing a lot of the nightmares I’ve heard from Black and queer writers about how long it took to go through the traditional book writing and publishing process.
I do want to try my hand at some fiction, and I don’t mind putting that through a long editing process and waiting possibly two years for it to go to market with a more traditional publisher.
But for this one, one that’s casting spells and praying prayers on my behalf of my Black ancestors, I wanted to keep more of the process to the chest.
Especially being Black and stateside. Don’t get me started on living in DC in these times.
But I do want you, my Substack and Patreon audience, to witness this, and my LinkedIn one to continue to build up the courage to bear witness.
So, I’ll be back next week and every week until launch, with book updates and such.
And if you’re ready, stay tuned! Also, I’ll be doing a makeover across all my websites and web platforms so that whatever URL you type in, you come here and yes, you see the black and gold imagery.
This site will also be the homebase for all book information, because while all those other sites are nice, this one has always been my home. And one day, just like my car (as of this week) and this website (since 2010), I will own my residence outright, so I can share as I see fit.
Until next time,
Kristen
