Desireé B Stephens

Yesterday I went into the store to buy some sweet treats and wound up spending a $110… Listen. 😂 ADHD and impulse spending are a chaotic combination, and because I know this about myself, I have developed a completely scientific economic policy wherein if (more like when) I spend money impulsively, I try to offset it by scoring something for free. Do not ask an economist about this.

I posed a question on my Facebook page before sitting down to write this: Goooood morning ☀️ During this Black August I’ve been sitting with an underlying premise: Mutual aid is not charity. So I want to ask… What does mutual aid mean to YOU? There are no wrong answers. How do YOU define mutual aid? Where did you learn what mutual aid looks like, and was it even called “mutual aid” when you learned it?

Do AI detectors identify authorship—or punish humans for sounding like the machines trained to imitate us? I have been writing poetry since before generative AI existed. Prose was my first love language. My first introduction to writing. I grew up with Irish and Black poets at my disposal, books all over the house, and a mother who would spend hours with me at the library. Later, she introduced me to anthology contests. I submitted poems. Sometimes I won. I have been writing for decades.