Everybody Come Alive

Dazzling essays on faith, family, and being a Black woman in America that explore what we do with the legacies we inherit, the faith that shapes our responses, and how we rebuild our stories for those who come after us–from the author of the popular blog Black Coffee with White Friends

On her blog, Marcie Alvis-Walker creates spaces for conversations about cultural norms, race, faith, and womanhood that encourage readers to unburden themselves of misconceptions they’ve inherited about the nature of God and their own identities.

Now, in Everybody Come Alive, a deeply intimate and illuminating collection of lyrical essays, Alvis-Walker invites readers into stories and personal histories from her own life. She tells candidly of her experience as a curious daughter raised under the watchful eye of the matriarchs who came before her. Readers are transported into stories of family, loyalty, and ambition; of assimilation, self-preservation, and risk; of creativity and the exercise of freedom. These essays reveal a journey of both inheritance and creation-a grappling of the things we are given, the things we must carry, and the ways we co-create life anew for ourselves and our communities.

“Let us rejoice let us rejoice let us rejoice,” Alvis-Walker writes. “On the bad days when no one speaks for us let us rejoice. On the long days when all seems to speak against us let us rejoice, and on the empty days when no one can see us let us rejoice let us rejoice.” Alvis-Walker’s unforgettable writing challenges readers to hold the contradictions that become inevitable and essential to every moment we encounter-moments that ultimately comprise the whole of our lives.