Smith’s sketches depicted a range of black American laborers, washerwomen, gravediggers, and other diverse and sundry folk. Thompson-Spires, who holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, states in the collection’s afterword that the inspiration for the title and, to some degree, the subject matter, was a series of literary sketches written in the 1850s by James McCune Smith and published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

Heads of the Colored People captures black lives in this current, divided, Facebook-Live-Black-Lives-Matter-#MeToo moment, and catalogues trauma’s impacts on black bodies, minds and souls, female and male, adult and child alike, as perpetrated against us, by us and between us in stunningly myriad forms: systemic racism and unconscious bias, police brutality, double consciousness, body consciousness, self-hatred, and more. In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” The heart of this collection of twelve stories, the thing that Thompson-Spires communicates with great verve, humor, and empathy, is the answer to that question-a booming “Yes!”-especially as experienced by black Americans. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Thompson spires