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Published Works


A Prayer for Mona


Sinful. It sounded like one voice,  a chant. I couldn't tell who was speaking. Was it two men or six? Their voices grew loud as a giant bell. Dahlia, Mona cried, doubled over, her shoulders shaking. Standing between the two trees that led to what used to be home; she hung her head as I walked away. With every step, I coughed to clear the dust out of my mouth and remembered Mona’s sad shoulders.


The full story is published in Blackberry: a magazine
 


First Marriage


The night I married, I was a girl knowing nothing of a woman’s thoughts or a woman’s hands. That was ten months ago. Our wedding room was on the upper floor separated from a smaller room by a skinny hallway and a flowered curtain that hid a storage nook. Saul pointed to the empty room and said our children would sleep there. Our bed had an iron headboard that leaned against the wall, across from a window. The headboard curved like double-dutch ropes and in the center was a flat metal disk painted with pink and blue flowers wrapped around green leaves.  


Get ready for bed, he said and turned his back to me. I put down the bouquet of day lilies and undid the shiny pearl buttons of the white wedding dress like there was no rush. 


The full story appears in  Empty Nest Anthology KY  Stories.



Piper's March


Piper raised his face to heaven and said a prayer. Gripping a flat stone, he took his time and dug a hole deep enough to keep scavenger animals away. He then laid Gabe’s body in it and piled dirt into the grave.  
Piper stood, his head high, and jiggled his legs. Picking up his knapsack, he noticed a pistol near the soldier’s grave. He picked it up, and ran his fingers over the barrel, rocking the weight in his hand.  


Read the full story: kwelijournal.org/fiction/2018/5/30/pipers-march-by-darlene-taylor  













 


Haunting Stones


The quiet Tidewater Highway passed wide fields, crossed shallow creeks, wound through meditative views of the Rappahannock River and dimly lit towns down the Virginia Peninsula on route to Hampton. Between teaching, I planned to explore the lands that Piper, a fictional character I’ve been writing about, might have traveled on his journey to freedom, and I hoped to learn something more about my own Virginia roots. 


Read the full story: thelearnedpig.org/haunting-stones/9336


1619-2019

Point Comfort, Hampton, Virginia

Fiction

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

ScewNoDaddy, Washington Writers Publishing House

Blood on a Blackberry, Feminist Studies

Piper’s March, Kweli Journal

First Marriage, Empty Nest Anthology KY Stories

The Whitetops of Tombstones, Kinfolks Quarterly

 A Prayer for Mona, Blackberry: a magazine
 

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Haunting Stones, The Learned Pig

Washington, D.C. in 5 Days, L.A. Parenting
Pretty Brown Girl with Big Brown Eyes, Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations That Changed Their Lives

Authentic Maine. Chasing Frederick Douglass, Portland Monthly

I, Too, Sing America, Public History Commons. National Council on Public History

 A Life in Vibrant Colors interview with David Driskell, National Museum for   Women in the Arts magazine  
 

Blood on a blackberry from prose to textile


in studio: textile to image

Columbus Museum of Art Aminah Robinson Writer-in-Residence

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."


                  - Zora Neale Hurston


darlene@inkpen.org

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