Praise for Dandelion
"Danielle Bainbridge's unflinching memoir explores mental illness, family, race, and so much more with clear eyes and beautiful prose. An exceptionally moving and powerful book."
John Green
“Dandelion is a kaleidoscopic memory palace that deftly reconstructs, in spare yet elegant prose, the beauty, pleasure,
and horror of Black remembrance and Black forgetting...I have seldom found a character simultaneously so exasperating and deserving of good fate.”
Myriam Gurba
Moez Surani
Danielle Shi (Adroit Journal)
Joseph Osmundson
Praise for Currencies of Cruelty
"Danielle Bainbridge’s DANDELION is urgent, essential, powerful, masterful. In prose that wraps readers into a world at turns piercingly clear and frustratingly ill at ease, Bainbridge illuminates the world as it is, in all its horror and beauty, and imagines a world more full of care for the worst moments in our lives. From jury duty to the hospital to the familial home, DANDELION brings us inside breakdowns and recovery, systemic violence and small graces. Like Joan Didion, Elissa Washuta, and Esmé Weijun Wang before her, Bainbridge’s collection conveys how the mind, our minds, are both precious and precarious, both singularly ours and impacted by the world around us. DANDELION is a masterclass in creative nonfiction and provides a roadmap to writers and artists navigating the 21st century."
"By all accounts Danielle Bainbridge’s memoir and larger body of work are coming into the world at a time when we all need to be paying attention to it. She’s a voice to look to, a light in the gloom."
"Bainbridge’s decision to employ a raw style of writing—familiar and overtly direct—asks of her reader an impassioned response, with its immediate, fluid, unfinished effect creating room for strong emotions, while generating an altered affect that convincingly relays psychological dislocation. She unpacks her feelings of confusion regarding race and colorism while abroad in Italy, as instances of refused connection cause her to question her beliefs—and how “elastic” she truly is in her thinking about kinship and community. At home, and abroad as an international member of a theatre troupe—“the equivalent of a traveling circus in the small hillside town where we were staying”—Bainbridge’s story considers with care the close encounters that shape her trajectory, sending her on her way to recover her inner peace."
Christian Trevor Lisa
(Another Chicago Magazine)
"'And I was so afraid,' Danielle Bainbridge writes. “But I want to tell you the truth.” With this as the guiding intention, we follow Bainbridge into the intimacy of her inner life, with its premonitions and memories, and outwards to the unjust mechanisms of society, culture and institutions -- especially in relation to her own diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This captivating collection of essays elegantly depicts the pain and complexities of mental health, femininity, and contemporary black life."
"Speaking in the first person about the shocking reciprocity of enslavement and enfreakment, Danielle Bainbridge gives voice to a chorus of those who are all too easily misremembered. To listen to her is to hear them."
Joseph Roach, Yale University
"By refusing to focus solely on how enslavers shaped the archive, Bainbridge keeps their hands from molding her research. Instead she prioritizes the desires of the enslaved, enfreaked, and too-long overlooked. Currencies of Cruelty can be read as lamentation of violence and celebration of ingenuity. But above all, it ought to be read as provocation. A call to begin every archival project by asking: how did my subject imagine my engagement with their legacy?"
"Bainbridge's contribution to performance studies cannot be overstated. Currencies of Cruelty fills a significant gap in nineteenth-century histories that traces the transition from enslavement to freedom. It will be a substantial study in performance studies, Black literary and cultural studies, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies."
Uri McMillan, author of Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies
"Currencies of Cruelty will be of interest to scholars across the fields of black, disability, and performance studies as well as those working on the history and memory of slavery. The book’s exploration of the intersecting histories of slavery and freak shows makes significant contributions to the field of disability studies and the growing subfield of black disability studies."
"This research is personal to Bainbridge, as she hears echoes of these performances and fugitivity in her own work as a Black performer and scholar. This leads her research and argumentation to be a template for theatre history scholars who are looking to expand their academic domains beyond the beaten paths they and others have already trod. Within this complex matrix of past, present, and future, Bainbridge’s Currencies of Cruelty reminds its readers that there is more to performance than just what is or what has come before it, and the best performers are always thinking about how to curate and engage with the act of future remembrance."
Feminist Studies
"The text moves with personal reflection alongside practice of this creative and archival research, emphasizing anecdotal affiliations of information that underscore imaginative wonderings."