New York Times-bestselling author adrienne maree brown knows we need each other more than ever, and offers a practice for holding collective power, righting wrongs, and generating true belonging.
Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war. In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of “loving corrections”; a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another.
Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown’s indispensable writing is an invitation to us all. Includes an afterword by Janine de Novais.
Reading Loving Corrections with friends? Download the free Reading & Discussion Guide with helpful prompts to guide your study and conversation.
What People Are Saying
"[A] refreshing and earnest meditation...Organizers should take note." Publishers Weekly
“In an era steeped in division and hateful rhetoric, it's hard to imagine a more important or necessary reminder that learning and accountability are best wielded not as tools of punishment and power but as keys to remembering our shared humanity on an endangered planet.” Kerry McHugh, Shelf Awareness
“Probing, fierce, and honest, the essays of Loving Corrections advocate for more compassionate, inclusive understandings of family, community, and oneself." Foreword Reviews
"The gracious and glorious adrienne maree brown offers readers practical reflections on relationships, accountability, and belonging." Karla J. Strand, Ms Magazine
"I've spent a week savoring this slim book and never want it to end. Thankfully, her footnotes give so many sources for further reading, so I can stay in this world much longer. A perfect book for changemakers to start." Alissa Redmond, The Southern Bookseller Review
“The beauty and grace of adrienne maree brown's praxis over many years is her political clarity braided tightly together with a profound humility. We are imperfect. We falter, and sometimes we fall down. But the point is to get up, 'self-correct,' and continue the journey and the fight. That is what Loving Corrections is all about. adrienne maree has supported so many on that journey toward more honest and meaningful lives, and in forging collective resistance to the oppressive conditions that compromise our lives. This beautiful and provocative book is one more of her many gifts to our movement toward a more just and humane world. And for this, we are forever grateful.” Barbara Ransby, writer, activist, historian, and author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
"The world becomes more soft, more creative, more loving, and more evolved every time adrienne maree brown decides to put pen to paper, and in Loving Corrections we have some of her best and most beautiful, thoughtful, and moving writing helping us to really delve deeply into what 'right relationship' means for ourselves in any given moment or circumstance. It is a gorgeous gift of thinking and writing but also a meditative thought partner to help readers begin to craft their own loving corrections in various parts of our lives." Tarana Burke, author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
“Another brilliant, compassionate gift from one of the great thinkers of our time. Once more, adrienne maree brown embodies that her brand of activism, like her brand of empathy, is inclusive and welcoming. ‘Healing is the victory,’ she promises, and we get there through authentic connection with each other, solidarity with the earth, and humility within liberatory movements. The reminder that brown offers is a gorgeous, illuminating one: we are so interconnected there is no pain, no joy, no liberation that doesn’t ripple through us all.” Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses
"Loving Corrections is easeful entry into the conversations that will transform our relationships. Whether via the book itself or the plethora of resources referenced, this book will help you and yours on the journey towards more accountability and authenticity in your human connections." Moya Bailey, coauthor of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender
“A rigorous exercise in trust, in self-awareness, humility, wisdom, and care. brown is extending a hand into the future, asking us to invest in new ways of being as collective salve and antidote to our pressing times with a promise that there is more waiting on the other side if only we reach toward each other and all we don’t yet know.” J Wortham, critic and author, herbalist and sound practitioner, and author of Work of Body (forthcoming)
"This book is an extraordinary gift to each of us, in our manifold identities. It is a gift to this tender, tumultuous young century we inhabit. I could not be more grateful for adrienne maree brown's singular, loving presence in our world. Read this, and share it with everyone you know." Krista Tippett, host of On Being
"Upon reading this most generous offering my first thought was of the gift in upbringing and exposure of being lovingly corrected by Black feminists who took the time to construct and deconstruct patterns of perception and behavior that shift our relationship to love, life, creation, and community. The encounters, lessons, insights, comments, and critiques that have shaped me, that I've memorized and know by heart, are in specific relation to this tradition, whether in person, in literature, or in conversation. This book is the embodiment of all of those precious offerings and is boundless in its generosity and wisdom. Here is a collection of wondrous ideas, observations, and guided meditations to illuminate our path beyond that which is sometimes difficult to articulate and even more difficult to unpack—amb cannot do the work for you, yet here they offer precise clarity of what that work is and how to approach it. With each chapter comes the realization of the additional copies I will need to purchase to distribute to every single person I love." Saul Williams, musician, poet, and filmmaker
“Loving Corrections is much needed medicine for these times. With warmth and tenderness, adrienne shares practical examples of how we can move toward being in right relationship with our kin, as well as the people we intend to work or grow with. This delightful book shows that accountability is something we need to practice within our intimate realms, and the wider world, in order to create futures that work for the majority of us. May Loving Corrections support us to experiment, build trust and become the people we have been waiting for.” Camille Sapara Barton, author of Tending Grief
About the Author
adrienne maree brown grows ideas in public. She is a student of the works of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Some of her books include Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, We Will Not Cancel Us, and the speculative fiction trilogy, Grievers. She is the editor of the Emergent Strategy Series.
Janine de Novais (Afterword) is a writer, sociologist, and cultural strategist interested in liberation as a cultural project, a matter of (un)learning. She is the author of Brave Community: Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination.