05/26/2026
Thought I was going to a regular author event but I should have known better! It was a whole and desperately needed REVIVAL. 🙌🏾
The “Score” Red Carpet Tour with Kennedy Ryan Author was a love letter to the many lives women survive, nurture, and reinvent. Poetry, testimony, church, and tenderness all acquiesced to the same microphone. ♥️🎹📖
During Mental Health Awareness Month, hearing Kennedy speak so openly about antidepressants, loving people through bipolar disorder, parenting a son with autism, and witnessing her grandmother’s dementia felt profoundly humanizing. It reminded me that storytelling isn’t escapism for Black women but also our medicine. It is how we survive authoritarian systems determined to erase our nuance, joy, vulnerability, and desire.
What mesmerized me most was her humility.
To hear a woman who self-published her very first book speak with such groundedness while simultaneously stepping into a first look deal with Peacock felt cinematic in itself. A preacher’s kid who smuggled romance novels since the eighth grade now preparing to see her stories translated onto the big screen? That is divine irony, legacy work, and what happens when Black women refuse to abandon imagination.
And maybe that’s why the room felt familial. Healing. Safe. Like every Black girl who was ever told her softness was frivolous got permission to romanticize her own life again.
Kennedy Ryan spoke about writing “the men we deserve” as resistance against patriarchy and misogyny, and honestly, the entire evening felt like resistance through beauty, tenderness, audacity, literacy, and love.
You could feel every chapter of her journey in the atmosphere — the self-publishing, the masterclasses with directors like Spike Lee, the romantic adventures, the years of persistence before the spotlight widened enough to hold her magnetism.
And without exaggeration?
This was the most LIT author event I’ve attended to date. 🐐🔥💯
Just a bookish lover girl meeting New York Times bestselling romance author GOAT Kennedy Ryan 😍… and leaving even more convinced that our stories not only deserve but are required and OWED theaters, standing ovations, and preservation. 🥰