For Black women who've grown weary of shrinking back. The Pink Robe Chronicles began in a moment of heartbreak. In August 2016, Rev. Dr. Melva L. Sampson wrapped herself in a tattered pink robe, pressed "Go live" on Facebook, and preached from her living room--grieving the police killing of Korryn Gaines and the silencing of her own voice in the pulpit. That livestream became a sanctuary. Week after week, she showed up in her robe, offering meditations on justice, healing, and spiritual insurgency. What started as a digital hush harbor grew into a movement. Now, in this powerful new collection of womanist wisdom, Dr. Sampson weaves together sermons, essays, letters, and reflections that center the lived experiences of Black women navigating identity, trauma, joy, and liberation. With fierce honesty and poetic depth, she chronicles her journey from silence to sovereignty, bringing ancestral wisdom, theological insight, and radical love into a sacred space for the weary and the rising. Each chapter closes with prompts, meditations, and affirmations that invite us into reflection, healing, and embodied truth-telling. The Pink Robe Chronicles offers a space to rest, rage, and reimagine. It is a love letter to Black women's brilliance, a call to collective healing, and a reminder that our stories are sacred--and our voices, unchained.
Rev. Melva L. Sampson, PhD, is a preacher, practical theologian, and digital innovator whose groundbreaking ministry, The Pink Robe Chronicles, has created sacred space for healing, imagination, and liberation. An assistant teaching professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, she weaves womanist wisdom, ancestral memory, and Afrofuturist vision into her scholarship and storytelling. Her work bridges the digital hush harbor, embodied spirituality, and communal flourishing, inviting readers into a practice of love, resilience, and justice. Tricia Hersey is a bestselling author, multidisciplinary artist, theologian and community organizer. Tricia is the visionary and founder of The Nap Ministry, the originator of the 'rest as resistance' framework, and creates sacred spaces where the liberatory power of rest can take hold in collaboration with communities all over the world. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, The Nap Ministry's Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture and We Will Rest!: The Art of Escape.
Ancestral Invitation Foreword Author's Note Prologue Introduction Part I?Without Sanction but Not Without Sanctuary Chronicle 1 -"My Mother Never Told Me to Hush"Chronicle 2 -"When Fatherhood is Curious...Chronicle 3 -"A Sanctuary of My Own" Part II?Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired Chronicle 4 - "Black Women Deserve (Pleasure, Rest, and Freedom)"Chronicle 5 - "For Carol (and All My Chronic Dis-Eased Sistahs)" Chronicle 6 - "I'm Exhausted but I do Want to Be Well..." Chronicle 7 - "All Death Ain't for Dying (For Ayesha Renee) Chronicle 8 - "Trauma Is a Merciless Heaux!" Part III?Raising Womanish Girls Chronicle 9 - "Celebrate the Interruption" Chronicle 10 - "I Am Free" Chronicle 11- "Stretching the Kink..." Chronicle 12- "Phoenix Rising: The Second Coming" From the Inside Lining... Part IV?It Wouldn't Be the First Time Chronicle 13 - "No Redemptive Quality..." Chronicle 14 - "Jesus, Save My Mother"Chronicle 15 - "Do it ScaredFrom the Inside Lining... Part V?Love in the Key of Liberation From the Inside Lining... Chronicle 16 - Timbs and Hard Bottoms Chronicle 17 - Dangerously in LoveChronicle 18 - A Love Supreme Part VI?Afrofuturist Altar Calls Chronicle 19 - Black to the Future... Chronicle 20--The Ancient Path to a Liberating Future Chronicle 21--No Ceiling, No Floor... Acknowledgments Notes
"In a time when I have become increasingly disillusioned with the pastors of this world, Sampson remains one of the few spiritual guides I trust. Poetic and clear, she invites us into the journey of her own reclamation of voice, body, and mind. This book will expand your imagination for the divine and train you to encounter again your own face. From the moment I opened it, I understood with an urgency: These pages are sacred ground." --Cole Arthur Riley, New York Times bestselling author of This Here Flesh "The Pink Robe Chronicles is a womanist archive of truth-telling, memory, and spiritual insurgency. This work adds vital language to our canon of dreaming as a Black, womanist technology of resistance. Dr. Melva Sampson's 'Afrofuturist Altar Calls' are grounded in lived theology, ancestral intelligence, and ethical imagination. She can summon liberated futures because she has faithfully chronicled the work required to build them. A sacred offering of witness, sanctuary, and becoming whole in public." --ebonyjanice Moore, author of All the Black Girls Are Activists "Some books find their way into our lives, and it is clear that the ancestors and the generations yet to come conspired to get them to us. They knew that those pages contained whatever we needed in order to be whole and well for the journey ahead. The Pink Robe Chronicles is one such book, and I stand in awe of the healing that will come as a result of it being in this world." --Candice Marie Benbow, author of Red Lip Theology "When Melva Sampson showed up online in her pink robe, you got her--unfiltered, unbossed, defiant, vulnerable, righteously angry, and healing--in real time. These live digital reflections formed a community because in speaking for herself, she voiced what so many others felt. Reading The Pink Robe Chronicles immerses you in the middle of Melva Sampson's stories without feeling like you missed anything. You'll read it in one sitting because you'll need the next insight now, but you'll keep pulling the book off your shelf for the poems, meditations, and reflections. Full of honesty and heart, The Pink Robe Chronicles is poised to be a new womanist classic." --Monica A. Coleman, PhD, author of Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology and Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman's Journey with Depression and Faith "This sacred dialectic narrative examines questions of revolutionary Black girlhood and womanist formation in a world that seeks to silence, surveil, erase, and shame Black girls and women. Merging womanist analysis with storytelling, Sampson speaks us into wholeness by insisting on bodily autonomy, spiritual agency, radical truth, remembering, sacred audacity, and righteous rage. The Pink Robe Chronicles is a necessary political technology of defiance and sacred reckoning that will move readers from scarcity to audacious possibility." --Tamura Lomax, PhD, author of Freeing Black Girls: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering "The Pink Robe Chronicles is a beautiful expression of womanist theology for the twenty-first century. With vision, passion, and deep love, Melva Sampson weaves together wisdom born of struggle, faith forged in community, and a prophetic commitment to healing and liberation. The Pink Robe Chronicles is theology at its best--a sanctuary to imagine a new world and cultivate a new humanity shaped by justice, renewed by tenderness, and open to the transformative power of ancestral faith." --Corey D. B. Walker, PhD, dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, and Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities
