imaginary anthology | v1 s1 "Ripeness Resisting Shame"

featured work by author: Aishatu Ado

Looks like we are writing a book.

Welcome to our imaginary anthology, Authored w/o Permission, the Better Done Collection, Volume 1, born inside the Creatorship of the Griots.

Creatorship is a weekly co-writing space where BIPOC and Global Majority creators gather to dream, write, imagine, envison and most importantly, author new worlds into being. Speculative and visionary fiction, memoir, poetry, essays, strange ideas and future histories are welcome here.

Authored w/o Permission, is released by our imaginary publishing company, manifesting under the working title: SafeHouse Publications as a dress rehearsal to the real thing.

Imagination has always been humanity's oldest technologies for building the future.

Aishatu Ado

"Ripeness Resisting Shame"

submission 1:

Leading us across the threshold with our inaugural offering is imagination powerhaus, author, poet, and peace technologist Aishatu Ado. It is with great delight we present to you, "Ripeness Resisting Shame."

RIPENESS REFUSING SHAME
By Aishatu Ado

The pears are heavy again.
Somewhere beneath the neem
my grandfather is still bargaining the roots
for sweetness after winter.

I wake thousands of miles away
with soil beneath my fingernails,
though I have planted nothing
except the impossible wish
that my life might finally resemble
its own longing.

The pantry fills itself with afternoon.
Enamel bowls remember okra.
Even the salt has a pulse.

The body stores sunlight in the wrists,
keeps fig trees behind the ribs,
waits years for the right weather
to split open.

Perhaps abundance
is simply ripeness
refusing shame.

we author, we become.

MEET THE AUTHOR: Aishatu Ado

📣 Real-world celebrations...

We're thrilled to celebrate two remarkable milestones in Aishatu's creative journey.

Congratulations on the continued success of Aroko Cooperative, a worker-owned design studio and publishing house, where she serves as a co-founding member.

We also celebrate the extraordinary success of her forthcoming poetry collection, Black Box Flight Recorder, selected as the Grand Champion of the 2025 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest.

"Black Box Flight Recorder is a sci-fi horror poetry collection composed of experimental poems that reimagine Black girlhood as a kind of flight data recorder for the crash of empire. It follows Black young women who refuse to remain passengers in oppressive systems determined to chart their destinies."

The chapbook will be released on April 6, 2027.

Pre-orders are now open. Reserve your signed copy while supplies last.

Wait there's more...

Aishatu's imagination doesn't stop at the page.

Alongside her work as an author and poet, Aishatu is also an accomplished visual artist whose creations have been exhibited, collected, and commissioned internationally. Her work has appeared in exhibitions such as 6th Dimension in Connecticut, has been released as limited-edition prints and NFTs, and was selected for projects including the Love Mandela initiative through the House of Mandela Art.

In 2022, Aishatu was one of just 27 artists worldwide invited by Nelson Mandela's daughter to create an original artwork inspired by Nelson Mandela's legacy. She also created an exclusive NFT commission for the Procter & Gamble Innovation Conference.

Most recently, Aishatu has been following her curiosity into new visual explorations, experimenting with collage through the Paris Collage Collective's weekly creative challenge. We're delighted to share one of her latest pieces with you here.

Aishatu's imagination, it seems, refuses to stay in a single medium.

Witnessing this goddess in her creative prowess will have your edges snatched; and in this case, it is a good thing.

Every world begins as an act of imagination.

contributor:

~ I am Miss Lady Andi, Professional Angel & Muse, Co-creatrix of the Creatorship of the Griots, wise woman of whimsy and wonder, and all around enfant terrible éternelle.