About Cicely
Cicely Belle Blain (they/them) is a Black, mixed, queer non-binary femme from London, United Kingdom now living on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Their ancestry is a mix of Gambian (Wolof), Jamaican and English.
Watch Cicely’s TED Talk
Burning Sugar
In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies.
They use poetry to illuminate their activist work: exposing racism, especially anti-Blackness, and helping people see the connections between history and systemic oppression that show up in every human interaction, space, and community.
In Burning Sugar, verse and epistolary, racism and resilience, pain, and precarity are flawlessly sewn together by the mighty hands of a Black, queer femme.