The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful [Hardcover]

Afrofuturist memoir on jazz, collaboration, and the search for collective well-being

Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella,The Mandorla Letters: for the hopefulblurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that are integral to the collective survival of our planet.

Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flautist, conceptualist, and composer. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and founder of the Black Earth Ensemble.The Mandorla Lettersis her first book.

"Epistolary speculation as memoir; performance document as romance; theory of collaborative composition as extended koan; notebook of a return to native land as otherworldly exit visa—The Mandorla Letters: for the hopefulis unfathomably rich in praise and mourning and morning and impossible arising in devoted grounding and emphatic sounding."—Fred Moten, author ofIn the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

"The Mandorla Letters: for the hopefulis an astonishing literary accomplishment by one of our contemporary jazz greats. Through experimental jazz thought, Mitchell Gantt brightens the possibilities for who we, as humans, might become."—Dawn Lundy Martin, Toi Derricotte Chair in English and director, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Universl3%