Tisa Bryant
Tisa Bryant is the author of Residual, a nonfiction assemblage of the interiors of grief, the home as archive, and the mystery of mothers, published in 2026 from Nightboat Books with the support of a publishing subvention grant from the Tara Coyt Publishing Fund. Her first book, Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on the mythologies of Black presences in film, literature, and visual art, was reissued by Wave Books in 2024. She is coeditor of the three-volume, cross-referenced literary journal The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborated with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book, a series of visual mixtapes and love letters to Black people and Black culture, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; an editor of hybrid writing for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora; and editor for The Deep West Assembly, a monograph of recent works by filmmaker Cauleen Smith. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem, for artists Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Laylah Ali, Suné Woods, and Jaime Cortez, and in various anthologies and publications. She is Associate Professor of English in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
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Tisa Bryant
Residual
Writing alongside the specter of premature death, Tisa Bryant traces the contours of Black women's interior lives and domestic spaces through meditations on literature, cinema, installations, and archival research to reaffirm her own way of being.
In the long aftermath of her mother's death, Tisa Bryant's Residual retrieves and catalogs what remains of her home, her psyche, and her creative practice. She filters through the remnants of her mother's everyday life asking, what else is an archive--a bookshelf, a dresser drawer, a relationship, a secret? Drawing on personal memories and impressions as well as archives of renowned Black women, who also died prematurely, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, Bryant's hybrid memoir details the intimate accretion of ephemera, outrage, intention, impressions, and failure in the wake of loss.
