A 5”x5” chapbook. 42 pages. Published October 2020.

What does it mean to know the interior lives of Black women? STUNT imagines scenes from the life of Nellie Jackson. Born in 1902, Miss Nellie ran a brothel in Natchez, Mississippi for sixty years until her death in 1990. A freedom fighter and entrepreneur who spied on the KKK and supported civil rights activists, Nellie Jackson is a legend that troubles our notions of Black narratives and histories. By turns jubilant, sensual and violent, STUNT imagines Nellie as a woman who revels in her Blackness, power and creation.

“Agostini’s understanding of the complex algebra that was southern Mississippi social mores plus the spoken and unspoken laws of commerce minus the opportunity cost of picking cotton vs peeling off linen ‘n lace times power in all its manifestations leave the reader like Nellie Jackson left her customers—satiated, but already hungry for more!”

—Frank X Walker, author of Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers