My book, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, is now available in North America wherever you get your hardcovers, ebooks, and audiobooks. I encourage you to shop indie, use Bookshop for ebooks, and Libro for audiobooks. There are signed copies of the hardcover at Water Street Books, Loyalty Books, Lost City Books, and Charis Books while supplies last. Loyalty and Charis also have signed paperback copies of my first book, The Disordered Cosmos. Tour details are here.

When I woke up yesterday in Arlington, Virginia, I thought what mattered about the day was that it was the official release date for my new book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. I had an early morning flight to Atlanta for my launch day event at queer and feminist Charis Books in Decatur, and I was already recovering from my first big bookstore event the night before, at Lost City Books in partnership with Loyalty Books.

By habit, I open my email when I’m still in bed. It’s a bad habit. But yesterday it was a good choice: I had received an email from a physicist friend, a former MIT colleague, an Iranian who lives in Tehran. He is alive. His family is ok. He was apologizing for all of the worry, for not writing earlier, but he couldn’t because of the internet blackout. Imagine an Iranian apologizing to anyone right now for being bad about email! But, he insisted to me, he would not let Donald Trump stop him from living his life.

Yesterday was my big day but it was completely eclipsed by the sense of relief I had. For weeks I was anxious, worried he had been targeted because he is a physicist. Though he is a fellow cosmologist, I have no idea how the US government thinks of him and his skillset. I worried I would never talk to my friend again, who is such a great physicist and a very empathetic soul. I worried also about whether I would have to finish the calculations he had shared with me as he worked through a new idea, if he was no longer around to finish them himself.

Yesterday morning I woke up, read my email, and then got ready to go to the airport. In my free moments, I fielded emails from the team at my publisher Pantheon Books that has been doing an incredible job supporting the book launch — shout out especially to my editor Denise Oswald, publicist Rose Cronin—Jackman, and marketing leader Bianca Ducasse. News of media mentions rolled in. Perhaps the most surprising? My book is in an April book roundup in Time Magazine. I got a book that talks about quantum field theory into Time! In his review, Hamilton Cain writes:

A physicist at the University of New Hampshire and a self-described “cosmic griot,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein distills the knowns and unknowns of our universe in a heady brew of astronomical observation, complex calculus, personal anecdote, and political polemic. The author drives toward the nature of time itself—“the tendency of entropy to increase over time orients time in one direction”—while pondering other realities revealed by new data and seemingly contradictory math. Literature may well be physics’ conjoined twin: she places Alice in Wonderland among her analysis of the Higgs boson particle. Buckle up and shoot for the stars. 

This was on top of a really delightful review in The Boston Globe last week:

In other words, “The Edge of Space-Time” isn’t just fiery but also fun.

I texted about Time with a thanks to Lisa Lucas, the former publisher at Pantheon who was part of the leading edge of Black women who were fired from top publishing positions as being nice to Black people went out of fashion. Lisa was the reason I had signed with Pantheon; almost certainly Lisa is the main reason my publisher invested in my work in the way that it did. Lisa, who used to run the National Book Foundation and has given many years of service to the book world, is still not employed in books. She will not get credit within the Penguin Random House behemoth if my book turns out to be a success.

Yesterday evening I went to Charis Books to celebrate the release of my book. That morning, Donald Trump had posted to truth social that he was going to destroy Iranian civilization if he didn’t get what he wanted. This is nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and it’s wild how normalized it is given that people were fired from their jobs simply for saying they weren’t sad that Charlie Kirk died. But supporting genocide is totally ok, apparently! My excitement from the morning about my friend was tempered: what if Trump did something that my friend and his family could not survive?

Luckily the worst did not happen and hopefully as I write this the ceasefire is holding.

While all of this has unfolded, a group of astronauts bravely strapped themselves into a spaceship made mostly by weapons maker Lockheed Martin and trusted that the rocket below them would safely deliver them to space. They flew in a loop around the moon, going further into space than people ever have before. Their mission, Artemis II, is part of a commercialization program to expand capitalism into space. Everyone laughed when, in pristine 4K video, a jar of Nutella flew across the Orion spacecraft like a perfectly placed (but in actuality accidental) advertisement. The media failed to cover that this video feed was made possible by a NASA Department of Defense technology developed at DOD’s Lincoln Laboratory, which is managed by MIT. In essence, we were all witnessing a DOD experiment with a new laser technology when we watched that Nutella do its own flyby.

The stenographic nature of media coverage of this event has made me nuts. The astronauts are brave and their achievement is an incredible example of human ingenuity. It shows what we can achieve when we set out to accomplish something big and difficult. I just wish they weren’t doing PR for weapons makers and capitalists who do not understand what it means to honor the land.

I’m writing these words from the airport in Atlanta, on my way to my event in Philadelphia, where I finished them. An ICE agent is the one who scanned my ID at the TSA security check. I hated it. I hated watching all the other ICE agents standing around doing nothing but being a threatening presence. I hated that every single one of them was a person of color, most of them Black.

At the same time, I am glowing from the experience I’ve had over the last few days. All the preorders from Loyalty that I had to sign. The amazing conversations I’ve had with booksellers who do the hard work of getting books into people’s hands. My childhood and chosen family have shown up for me in person and virtually. In a few cases, people drove long distances to come wish me well. I got to meet people I’ve known for years but never had a chance to hug in person. I had fucking amazing conversation partners. I was also blessed by fellow Black women writers who took time out of their own busy promotion and prep schedules to come see and support me. I’m thinking especially of my conversation partner on Monday, Camonghne Felix, whose book Let the Poets Govern is a remarkable work of genius. I’m thinking also of Shannon Sanders, whose novel The Great Wherever is brilliantly written and is gonna knock your socks off in July. I’m also talking about Tayari Jones, whose new novel Kin quite deservedly debuted on the NYT bestseller list. A love note to all Black women, to Blackqueer women especially, and to disabled ways of being in the world, Kin is simply extraordinary.

I had a great time talking about why thinking physics matters for everyone on NPR’s Short Wave and discussing Star Trek and gender identity with Jessie Gender. I loved talking with Moiya McTier on Pale Blue Pod about mythological rules versus physics rules. And I enjoyed writing for Literary Hub about how my book is one of several new releases this spring that grapple with metaphor.

My book is emerging into this very fucked up world. And my book is about how amazing and inspiring the universe is. It is about the importance of whimsy and joy, even when our corner of the universe feels like it is falling apart. It is also about how we teach our minds to imagine the most fantastical possibilities, like we might get ourselves out of this. That’s possible. There’s no cosmic rule saying we can’t.

I will try to carry that with me as I go forward with this tour.