"For me as a Black woman, wash day is a ritual that’s so familiar it almost is like a song that has been memorized and passed down, and this book beautifully and creatively captured that inherent poetry and lyricism." —Ifeoma Ozoma

Wash Day is an exploration of language around Wash Day rituals for Black Women. The book leverages a dataset of transcripts from YouTube videos of Black hair vloggers sharing their Wash Day rituals, along with stories of their lives as told through hair. This work uses language as data, by transforming and training algorithms to produce new inter-woven texts that shed light on the intimacy and sensual nature of Wash Day, and what Black Hair means to Black Women.

Arwa Michelle Mboya is an experience designer from Nairobi, Kenya. She is the founder of the Black Hair Lab, which works at the intersection of design and technology for Black Hair. She has a Bachelor's degree from Yale University and a Master's Degree from the MIT Media Lab. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Format: Paperback

Author: Mboya, Arwa Michelle

Publisher: COUNTERPATH

Pub Date: April 15, 2023

Category: Poetry / Black Studies

ISBN: 9781933996813

Evening House Books

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Poetry Collections

You Better Be Lightning

Animal for the Eyes

Is This My Final Form?

Wash Day

The Death of Poetry