Hub City Press to publish Neesha Powell-Ingabire's debut essay collection

Hub City Press is proud to announce it will publish Neesha Powell-Ingabire's debut essay collection, Come By Here: Memory, Murder, and Homecoming on Georgia's Geechee Coast, in the fall of 2024. The collection of personal essays juxtaposes the fraught racial history of coastal Georgia with lived experiences growing up there as a disabled and queer Black girl.

In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire has collected essays that span genres, including lyric essays, memoir, reportage, and movement journalism. One connective thread holding the book together is place, as each essay is tied to the writer’s home region of coastal Georgia. The region itself becomes a character alongside Powell-Ingabire’s family and interview subjects. 

So much of this book undoes what is picturesque about coastal Georgia, unearthing stories many people hoped we’d never hear of historic and modern lynchings, of Black women expected to be strong despite suffering suicidal ideation. Yet so much of this book is also an act of love, of preservation: of the landscape, of the Black southern traditions coastal Georgia is home to, of the Gullah Geechee people, of Powell-Ingabire’s family. In uncovering their own family’s history—ties to indigenous culture and excommunicated members of Christian churches—they also uncover long lost stories of the community. None of this history making comes easy. Even the writer’s own beloved grandmother is buried in an unmarked grave. But in the attempt, they’ve done something remarkable, reclaiming the narrative of home while making sense of their own identity as a Black, queer, disabled writer.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire (she/they) is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, grant writer, cat parent, spouse, and auntie living in Atlanta/occupied Creek territory. Neesha’s writing has been published in various publications, including online on Autostraddle, B*tch, Black Girl Dangerous Blog, Black Youth Project, Everyday Feminism, Harper’s Bazaar, Prism, RaceBaitr, Rewire.News, Scalawag, TheBody, The Counter, VICE, Xtra, YES! Magazine and in print in A Blade of Grass, the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, Hexing the Patriarchy, Monday (the journal of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery), and the Oxford American. They graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia with a B.A. in Journalism & Mass Communication and is currently finishing a MFA in Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University.