Loving Corrections

Now available for preorder from AK Press

This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of “loving correction” rather than mere critique, author adrienne maree brown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable by setting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.

Loving Corrections is divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essays including “A Word for White People” and “Relinquishing the Patriarchy” and writing on topics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities. The second section expands and updates pieces from brown’s popular monthly column “Murmurations” in YES! Magazine that explore accountability—within oneself and community—with depth, inventiveness, and empathy.

Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the “corrections” in the book’s title are intended to explore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountable from our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.

Building on her previous work—especially Holding Change and We Will Not Cancel Us—brown reminds us how much we need each other: “It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change.” Includes an afterword by Janine de Novais.

Praise for Loving Corrections:

“The beauty and grace of adrienne maree brown’s praxis over many years is her political clarity  braided tightly together with a profound humility. We are imperfect. We falter, and sometimes we fall down. But the point is to get up, ‘self-correct,’ and continue the journey and the fight. That is what Loving Corrections is all about. adrienne maree has supported so many on that journey toward more honest and meaningful lives, and in forging collective resistance to the oppressive conditions that compromise our lives. This beautiful and provocative book is one more of her many gifts to our movement toward a more just and humane world. And for this, we are forever grateful.”

—Barbara Ransby, writer, activist, historian, and author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

“The world becomes more soft, more creative, more loving, and more evolved every time adrienne maree brown decides to put pen to paper, and in Loving Corrections we have some of her best and most beautiful, thoughtful, and moving writing helping us to really delve deeply into what ‘right relationship’ means for ourselves in any given moment or circumstance. It is a gorgeous gift of thinking and writing but also a meditative thought partner to help readers begin to craft their own loving corrections in various parts of our lives.”

—Tarana Burke, author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

“A rigorous exercise in trust, in self-awareness, humility, wisdom, and care. brown is extending a hand into the future, asking us to invest in new ways of being as collective salve and antidote to our pressing times with a promise that there is more waiting on the other side if only we reach toward each other and all we don’t yet know.”

—J Wortham, critic and author, herbalist and sound practitioner, and author of Work of Body (forthcoming)

“This book is an extraordinary gift to each of us, in our manifold identities. It is a gift to this tender, tumultuous young century we inhabit. I could not be more grateful for adrienne maree brown’s singular, loving presence in our world. Read this, and share it with everyone you know.”

—Krista Tippett, host of On Being

“Upon reading this most generous offering my first thought was of the gift in upbringing and exposure of being lovingly corrected by Black feminists who took the time to construct and deconstruct patterns of perception and behavior that shift our relationship to love, life, creation, and community. The encounters, lessons, insights, comments, and critiques that have shaped me, that I’ve memorized and know by heart, are in specific relation to this tradition, whether in person, in literature, or in conversation. This book is the embodiment of all of those precious offerings and is boundless in its generosity and wisdom. Here is a collection of wondrous ideas, observations, and guided meditations to illuminate our path beyond that which is sometimes difficult to articulate and even more difficult to unpack—amb cannot do the work for you, yet here they offer precise clarity of what that work is and how to approach it. With each chapter comes the realization of the additional copies I will need to purchase to distribute to every single person I love.”

—Saul Williams, musician, poet, and filmmaker

“Loving Corrections is easeful entry into the conversations that will transform our relationships. Whether via the book itself or the plethora of resources referenced, this book will help you and yours on the journey towards more accountability and authenticity in your human connections.”

—Moya Bailey, coauthor of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender