Rooted in Love, Written in Bloom

A Conversation with Author Rachel Eliza Griffiths of The Flower Bearers

Black Girls Who Write invites you to a soulful Virtual Book Chat centered on The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths—a luminous reflection on love, creative sisterhood, and the women who shape us.

At its heart, The Flower Bearers is about what we carry forward. Through memory, art, and devotion, Griffiths honors the transformative relationships that anchor our lives—our chosen sisters, our literary foremothers, our partners, and the versions of ourselves that bloom through love. This book reminds us that even in moments of rupture, Black women continue to root themselves in connection, creativity, and care.

As a community, we’ll gather to discuss love as a sustaining force, friendship as legacy, and storytelling as a way to witness, remember, and grow. This conversation is for readers and writers who believe in the power of Black women’s bonds and the beauty that comes from telling our stories honestly and tenderly.

Date: Tuesday, February 17
Time: 7:00 PM EST
Location: Virtual

Come ready to reflect, connect, and celebrate the stories—and the women—that keep us blooming.

About Rachel

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships from many organizations, including Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, and other publications. Her debut novel, Promise, was a Kirkus Reviews and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year.

About the Book

About the Memoir, The Flower Bearers

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love.