Residual (Paperback or Softback)

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. 

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on Black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborates with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book series of visual mixtape love letters to black people and black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has written for shows and catalogs for artists Jacob Mason-Macklin, Cauleen Smith, Laylah Ali, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji, among others, and has work forthcoming in Brink. She is an assistant professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.