The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Summer Literature Grant to Soraya Palmer for her novel “A Visibility Spell”.

Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, which has been named a best or most anticipated novel by Today, Elle, Ms. Magazine, and Goodreads among others. The novel is currently a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction. She has been awarded grants, residences, and fellowships for her writing from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, Blue Mountain Residency, and the Nawat Fes Residency in Fes, Morocco. She was born and raised in Flatbush and is a licensed clinical social worker who has organized and advocated for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, tenants facing eviction, and victims of police brutality. She currently teaches Graduate Fiction at CUNY City College and Writing Magical Realism for the Center for Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.

A Visibility Spell investigates the ways that racism seeps into our subconscious desires, negatively impacting our mental and physical health. My book poses two central questions: where does the Black woman go to escape invisibility if she can’t exist within her own imagination? And how do we as Black women learn to re-imagine ourselves back into existence? Soraya attempts to answer these questions through examining pop culture, Black history, and her own experience as a Black woman navigating love and self-acceptance in New York City. Soraya’s idea for the title comes from finding that people often turn to magic when all else has failed them. Excerpts of this memoir-in-essays have been published in Hazlitt, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, and the Whatever Gets You Through anthology, which included essays from Alicia Elliot, Amber Dawn, Lauren McKeon with a foreword by Jessica Valenti.

This book is one that I wish that I had at different points in my life when feeling particularly stuck in my own traumas and insecurities. As a social worker, I have worked with Black women and Black youth in schools, on Riker’s Island, and in community centers on issues such as navigating dating violence and healthy self-esteem. I have listened to their stories, read their poetry, and witnessed the many ways they have tried to reimagine themselves as lovers, mothers, and fighters. As Black people we are still more likely to be jailed for our mental illnesses than treated for them. This fight for mental health liberation is embedded in everything I write. My hope is that my readers will take up the fight with me. adrienne maree brown asserts that in order to fight for a better world, we first have to imagine it. I hope we’ll have fun while we’re at it.

Please visit Soraya’s website, Instagram or X for more information.