We Are Owed.

​We Are Owed. is the debut poetry collection of Ariana Brown, exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces. Through poems about the author’s childhood in Texas and a trip to Mexico as an adult, Brown interrogates the accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. We Are Owed. asks the reader to develop a Black consciousness by rejecting U.S., Chicano, and Mexican nationalism and confronting anti-Black erasure and empire-building. As Brown searches for other Black kin in the same spaces through which she moves, her experiences of Blackness are placed in conversation with the histories of formerly enslaved Africans in Texas and Mexico. Esteban Dorantes, Gaspar Yanga, and the author’s Black family members and friends populate the book as a protective and guiding force, building the “we” evoked in the title and linking Brown to all other African-descended peoples living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”

​Released July 29th, 2021

Foreword by Alan Pelaez Lopez
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Cover art by Desiree Vaniecia

Click here to order We Are Owed.

Official Launch Events

Book Release Party
July 29th  |  7pm-9pm CT
Poetry readings and conversation with Ariana Brown, Loyce Gayo, and Sasha Banks
​Livestreamed at the link below

Launch Interview
July 30th  |  7pm-9pm CT
Short poetry reading by Ariana Brown followed by an in-depth interview facilitated by Jacqui Germain
Livestreamed at the link below

Press

Bitter Brown Femmes, Episode 54 // Featuring Ariana Brown
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Audioboom

LitHub, "Letter to Yanga, from Six-Year-Old Ariana"

LIT Fridays at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center
Reading & Interview hosted by Jessica Lanay

New Books Network  |  Interview with Ariana Brown
Facilitated by Jonathan Cortez

Tour & Booking

Ariana Brown is going on a *virtual* book tour with Alan Pelaez Lopez in fall 2021. For more information about the tour and how to book the artists, please click here.