Book Talk: The Black Madonna with Christena Cleveland

Meet Black Madonna—Mother of Abundance, Holy Insurrectionist, Our Lady of F Around and Find Out

This bold reclamation of the divine feminine offers a new vision of Black Madonna as a unifying figure of refuge, resistance, and renewal. When we are exhausted and burned out, Black Madonna invites us to surrender to her protective embrace and be revitalized by her subversive life force. When disillusionment takes hold, Black Madonna offers radical belonging—urging us to reclaim our own sacred power.

Christena Cleveland expertly blends personal experiences, global stories, and historical records to reveal the cunning colonial forces that poison our social and spiritual landscape, while illuminating our Divine Ancestor as an endless source of spiritual nourishment, liberation, and protection. Intimate invocations and empowering rituals within each chapter help you to nurture your own authentic connection with Black Madonna and feel her loving guidance through the twists and turns of life. This book is a call to mystic-activism—for all of us who are alert to injustice and fervently devoted to co-creating a world of love.

Christena Cleveland, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, public theologian, mystic-activist, and author of several books, including The Black Madonna: Icon of Resistance and Nourisher of Souls and God Is a Black Woman. She is the founder of the Black Madonna Freedom School, which nurtures courageous and compassionate people who are uprooting white patriarchal religious conditioning in themselves and their communities, while skillfully planting intersectional divine feminine wisdom.

A weaver of Black liberation and the divine feminine, Christena is a sought-after speaker and facilitator who integrates psychology, theology, storytelling, and somatics as she guides people of all races and genders into freedom, wholeness, and embodied justice. Her work has been featured in a number of major media outlets including the History Channel, PBS, Essence Magazine, the Washington Post, NPR, and BBC Radio. In 2022, she published God is a Black Woman (HarperCollins), which details her 400-mile walking pilgrimage across central France in search of ancient Black Madonna statues, and examines the relationship among race, gender, and cultural perceptions of the Divine. A bona fide tea snob, lover of Black art, and Ólafur Arnalds superfan, Christena makes her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Helena James is a Chicago-based literature, theatre, arts, and culture content creator. She serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Public Library Foundation, championing access to books and learning across the city. She is also a content partner with Broadway in Chicago and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Recently, she helped found Morrison Code, a literary society honoring Toni Morrison's legacy. Helena believes art and stories are ways we find ourselves and each other.