Ebony Tomatoes Collective and the Importance of Literary Safe Spaces

Words: Joli-Amour DuBose-Morris

I met Ava Pauline Emilione, writer and Ebony Tomatoes Collective’s Editor in Chief, for the first time at the launch party for the magazine’s twenty-fourth issue, Perennial Song. The two of us had been pen pals for four months, and I noticed when we first met we were practically wearing the same outfit. 

That observation was the only coherent thing I could say out loud, most of my other murmurs a jumble of nervous giggles and compliments, even though by this point Emilione felt to me like family. They had edited some of my work for the magazine, and we’d bonded through shared experiences, annotations and comments.

At the launch party, I saw that everyone else who’d been featured in this issue. Poets and prose writers who wrote about their grievances with family, death, sexuality, and oppressive memories, all came to the microphone with gratitude for not simply just being published, but for the opportunity have their experiences validated. Especially when other literary magazines, some notable, but all traditional, have usually collapsed our stories through rejection letters and emails. “It’s just not fit for us at this time.” At this time, at this time, at this time. Will there ever be a time? 

Emilione knows what this feeling of rejection is like. In 2022, while they were attending NYU for their undergraduate program, they felt separated from their peers. They said, “A lot of times, in the workshops we would have, people wouldn't really understand my writing. Or there would be a white professor who was like, ‘This is not a political story.’ And then the story was about lesbians who were Black Panthers. I just felt very isolated. Like, I love the practice of writing, but I didn't feel loved in my practice of writing, and that made me a little sad. So I thought, ‘What can I do to remedy that?’”

“In a time where such grief only continues to grey, Ebony Tomatoes Collective resurges a state of warmth.”

As these experiences kept repeating, Emilione used this lack of representation and empathy as a catalyst for Ebony Tomatoes Collective’s existence. The year before, Emilione’s abuelita (to whom the current issue is dedicated) had previously passed from Covid. She was a woman who even through her worst days and worst experiences moved with ebullience and grace, a type of kindness that radiates even after death. With this love in the back of Emilione’s mind, they began to conceptualise the yearn for permeance. “What lasts throughout time, what archives can be maintained through such turbulent times in the nation's history, but specifically within Black and queer memory.”

Later that year, Ebony Tomatoes Collective was born as a writing club which centred the perceptions of Black, female, and queer writers throughout New York. Over time, it became a digital blog as well as a physical gathering, and then it morphed into an online and print magazine, which publishes writing and also makes effort to raise awareness, provide mutual aid, and conjoin the community. The work that Ebony Tomatoes does is not just about the work itself, but about the people it's connected to. The income they receive from newsletter subscriptions and magazine transactions goes toward paying their writers, and those who’ve been harmed by this administration’s authoritarian use of military force and ICE patrol, as well as those suffering in the genocides across Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and more, so many more. In order to sustain these grassroots, Ebony Tomatoes asserts a term of non-negotiables. 

Cheyenne Edwards, the magazine’s social media director, says: “I think, any form of censorship, is a non negotiable for me, just because what has made us so resonant with people is authenticity and being willing to say quiet parts out loud and things like that. Like, that's what people have come to know Ebony Tomatoes for. And so I would hope that we always stay true to that authenticity and avoid censoring ourselves and others as we grow and expand as a collective.”

With the safe space this collective has provided, Edwards was able to write an ode piece, “Lens to the Soul” which was dedicated to her late relative Gerald Edwards (which is also published in Perennial Song). “It was the hardest piece I've ever had to write, just because I was really going through the emotions in real time. But I'm glad I did it because I really needed to. I didn't have the space to do that. And the issue and its content provided me the space to do my grieving and overcome some of my feelings around it, and unpack some of my feelings around it, unlocking new feelings about it. It allowed me to just work it out.”

Perennial Song, an issue thematically connected to grief, comes at such a timely point in our lives. Marginalised communities, Black women and LGBTQ+ people are grieving what their lives could’ve looked like. From the 300,000 Black women who’ve been laid off in the past year, to the reintroductions of lynching in the South since Charlie Kirk passed, scrutinisations of DEI, and blatant transphobia and misgendering happening within the media, we are all grieving a world that even before this current administration never existed. 

And between the possible pardoning of Diddy and the resurfaced tweets of the 2010s where multiple rappers berated the mere existence of Black women and infantilised or fetishised our oppressors, we all carry a storm of grief. 

In a time where such grief only continues to grey, Ebony Tomatoes Collective resurges a state of warmth. Emilione affirms, “I've done a lot of work, and all the people involved, have done a lot of work to make Ebony Tomatoes spaces, both in our magazines, and in our events, feel safe to Black people and Black and queer people, and that's an ongoing effort. I'm not going to say that we've achieved it, there's always room to grow and like to improve on those things, but that has always been an intention for me, an intention for us.”

This collective aims to support the stories of Black people by choosing not to reduce these stories to structures, fragmentations, and a prose style only the classic white-wigged and powder-faced writers could appraise to. We have always been a group to defy. “I think at Ebony Tomatoes, we think about storytelling in a different way. A lot of Black families and Black people, we grow up in families where they're telling these really harrowing stories, at least in my family, like, you know, I would just be in the kitchen and my mom would be telling me about some very traumatic and violent events that happened in my family but [they’d be] raw and real and just off of the cuff. Our soul is coming from our memory and from our intergenerational memory. And so I think that Ebony Tomatoes is special in a way, because it actually holds a space for that, and it allows us to simultaneously do editorial work along with preserving the meaning and the slowness and sometimes abstract nature or surreal nature of the works that we're editing.”

Although it is such an avalanche of a word, both Emilione and Edwards can agree liberation arrives as this slow reality. And while our current reality is late to this vision, Ebony Tomatoes is not, and this magazine will continue to practice personal and political liberation regardless of those who object.