Celeste Rita Baker (1966-2025)

Glass Bottle Light Shining On: Remembering Celeste Rita Baker (July 28, 1966 - October 30, 2025)

by  Sheree Renée Thomas

 

 

I am shaken and deeply sorry to share the news of the passing of our brilliant friend, colleague, and author, Celeste Rita Baker.

 

 

 

I am grateful to Celeste’s daughter Chana, and dear friends Cesi and Wendi. One in our circle has gone on, now an ancestor. I had the privilege of meeting this wonderful, multi-gifted soul at the iconic Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York, twenty-five years ago where I was teaching my speculative fiction writing workshop. She was a bright star shining inwardly and outwardly, and she always made me laugh. She is the writer who not only brought a unique vision to her own work, but also a keen and insightful eye to that of others in the workshop. She pushed herself and made folks feel stronger, their vision for themselves and their creative work wider, better. We all loved chatting together so much, that our workshops would sometimes spill over into the Strand Diner on 96th & Broadway, and continue into the night. Celeste was beautiful, creative, pragmatic, and observant, and her musical, beautiful voice full of her beloved home was always a joy to hear.

 

Art filled her house. I remember gasping when I first walked in her Harlem brownstone to see a huge, gorgeous loom with her latest work-in-progress. The page could not hold her talent. Celeste cane into our world full to brimming.

 

A Virgin Islander rooted in the language and rhythms and lore of her culture, her highly original work always generated deep discussion and exploration. I loved how deftly she wove in social commentary and familial dynamics in ways that startled and engaged. She never wrote the same kind of story. Each was the result of an alchemy and excavation only she knew. 

 

She was the author of the collection Back, Belly, and Side: True Lies and False Tales (2015, Aqueduct Press) and many stories. She was writing a novel that I was hoping to see in our world some day. Among her many accolades, she was honored with the 2021 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for "Glass Bottle Dancer." I also had the honor to publish her story, "Pedestals, Proclivities and Perpetuities," in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a classic Celeste tale that could only come from her imagination, so weirdly wonderful and disturbing in increasingly unexpected ways.

 

Celeste was a dear friend, a mother, and an incomparable author, wholly original in her voice and aesthetic who set the page, the stage, and rooms afire. 

 

I will forever hold the memory of her flying to Memphis at my request for the first Black Speculative Arts Movement festival I hosted in Art Village Gallery. She not only came, rolling up her sleeves to help, but she also donned one of her beautiful handmade trouping costumes to perform her beautiful story of the Earth dancing in the Carnival parade as itself. This work of art was a dragon—with claws—that she made herself. She gifted me the headdress before she left. It hangs in a place of pride in my home, a bit of whimsy to brighten the day. Celeste knew that that carnival tale was one of my favorites of hers, and watching its impact in my hometown lifted my spirit. I was proud to welcome Celeste to my home and for her to see our river city the way we see it, with love.

 

Of course her beautiful voice, evocative story, and thrilling performance left her audience spellbound. We are spellbound still. 

 

Her great work will live on, but Celeste Rita Baker—the brilliant writer, the magnetic performer, the insightful, loving friend—will always be missed.

 

She is survived by her cherished daughter, Chana, who cared for her and by her many loved ones, dear friends, and readers.

 

May she rest in peace.

 

T. D. Walker's Parallax

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Parallax by T.D. Walker, in both print and e-book editions, the ninety-eighth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. Parallax tells an intriguing story in a mix of poetry and prose. (Perhaps I ought to note here that although the story relates the struggle of a programmer with an AI, the author did not employ AI in its composition.) The book is available now at www.aqueductpress.com. 

 

 You can read a sample from the book here: https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-282-4.pdf

 

An ancient stone monument is toppled by protestors on Earth. A photographer famous for his images of the monument suffers a stroke. His programmer daughter seeks to generate a memorial to him by feeding his photographs to the AI she maintains. When the AI is fed art, music, and literature from the women who affected his work and, in turn, those who influenced theirs, the memorials begin to take unexpected forms. The poems in Parallax ask us to consider how memorials made by AI bring us closer to and farther from those they are intended to honor.

Advance Praise 

“Parallax is an intriguing collection, centered on grief and grieving as a particularly and peculiarly human act. It rewards careful and patient reading as it spins its lens from human to machine and back again, revealing the gaps, fractures, and impossible distances between us and even the most advanced of artificial intelligences.”  —Deborah Davitt, author of Xenoforming

 

Public Discourse and Resistance

 The liberal news media in the US continually reports on this or that European country going autocratic or being threatened by blocs of voters supporting autocracy. More sporadic, though, is their coverage of political ferment and expressive dissent in the many places in the world that are already autocratic (albeit with paper democracies). One of those places is Peru. Reading a Reuters article last weekend about a particular direct action organized by a group named “Gen Z,” I was struck again by the chasm between the language used by the liberal media (and, therefore, in liberal public discourse) and the reality of events they are either purporting or honestly trying to describe. To its credit, the Reuters article cites information that can provide at least some context for interpreting the impoverished language used for description: that Peru’s president has a 2.5% approval rating and its congress a 3% approval rating, and that the “protest” as they call it is just the latest event in an ongoing struggle (not a word that the article uses) against an oppressive government (and no, they did not of course use the O-word).

 

"There's been a low, simmering level of discontent in Peru and it's been that way for actually quite some time," said Jo-Marie Burt, a visiting professor at Princeton University's program in Latin American studies who has researched Peruvian politics for decades.

 The discontent, Burt said, has been fueled by corruption scandals, economic insecurity, rising crime and anger over a lack of accountability over dozens of protesters who were killed by security forces when Boluarte assumed power in late 2022 after former President Pedro Castillo was removed from office and arrested. [quotes from the Reuters article]

 

Searching on “protests” in Peru, I found reports from other news organizations on a massive transportation workers strike, including video footage featuring scenes of violence. For me, interpreting such videos is difficult; my experience of street actions has all been in the US, where peaceful protest is the rule and most violence is perpetrated by the police rather than by participants in the action. Visual news media finds peaceful activity boring and of no visual value, and so they inevitably seek out scenes that show or even simply imply violence, no matter its relevance or significance, and duly declare the action to have been a riot or a “violent protest.” (Anyone remember the Subway sandwich incident that got thrown out of court?) Riots, in the US, tend to be police rioting, not civilians. The late anthropologist and veteran political activist David Graeber has an excellent essay anatomizing the power dynamics of political street action in his posthumous collection The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. I recommend it for anyone interested in reading between the lines of mainstream media coverage.

 

So. One of the things bothering me about the coverage (which in the case of this Reuters article is as “objective” as it ever gets) is the inadequacy of talking about “protests” when street actions (what half a century ago were called “demonstrations”) are constant and ongoing and the political conditions in which they occur are extreme, such as in the case of Peru. “Protest” is a word that implies weakness and reflects an attitude that considers it as something like a tantrum. Street action is taken in order to amplify political speech that is either going unheard or is being drowned out by money (which according to the US Supreme Court is a form of protected “speech”). Putting one’s body into the street in the face of possible state violence requires powerful determination and willingness to risk one’s physical, social, and economic well-being. (Yeah, there are a few people who love risk-taking, but it’s not characteristic of most activists.) 

 

“Protest,” to be clear, is a belittling description for an important form of public speech. But it’s in common parlance, so we tend to use it without thinking. (As I mentioned above, “demonstration” used to be common parlance.) Our discourse, I believe, needs to recognize that resistance against oppressive policies and actions, a form of struggle against the status quo, is not simply “protest.” Rather, it’s an assertion of public speech that is not being heard by the people who are running things and so requires amplification.  

 

So now, to the US. Contrary to the perceptions of the New Yorker political round table folks who recently lamented the lack of “protest,” every day there are “protests” all over this country, a response to the regime that is constant and ongoing. Such demonstrations are being made all over the US, not just in “blue” cities like Seattle, Chicago, and NYC. A ferry ride away from Seattle, across the Salish Sea in rural Kitsap County, for instance, at least three small-town organizations have had weekly Pro-Palestine demonstrations since January 2024 and other groups have mounted at least three anti-fascist, anti-regime actions a week for the last several months. 

 

Such public demonstrations of resistance are necessary because the current regime is forcing deadly, impoverishing, antisocial policies on us that the majority are seriously, deeply opposed to. Interestingly, mainstream Time magazine offered an alternative to the dismissiveness of “protest” (and thus makes it headline more powerful): “The Growing Resistance to Mass Deportation. “Resistance,” yes, says all that “protest” cannot. Sometimes semantics are more important than we are aware of in the moment of speech.

 

I’d like to conclude with Nisi Shawl’s manifesto for resistance, recently posted on Bluesky.

 

“Strategies and Qualities of Unstrained Resistance”

by Nisi Shawl

Transparency - We will be surveilled and infiltrated.  Let them know we know and that there’s nothing to hide.  I realized this fifty years ago, when I found out the government had a file on me.

 

Withdrawal - Rather than confrontation: maybe a general strike or evacuation or self-imposed lockdown is in order.

 

Fullness - Or maybe the opposite is called for: peaceful occupation.  Thousands of visitors and tourists.

 

Art - This has consistently been favored via divination. Any forays into shared or public space or time should be framed as art.

 

Kindness - We need to pay attention to one another’s needs and do our best to meet them: food, medicines, labor, supplies, knowledge.

 

Entanglement - We want to recognize our kinship with those deployed against us.  We greet their highest selves with our highest selves.

Bankrupting Skybanks by Erik Hofstatter

 

 

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Erik Hofstatter's Bankrupting Skybanks, in both print and e-book editions, from Aqueduct Press. Bankrupting Skybanks, a novella in dark poetic prose, is the ninety-seventh volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series. You can purchase it now at www.aqueductpress.com.

  

 

The disquiet in our heads has started fires again. God tries to smoke us out. We have red hair because our heads are alight. But we resist His interpretation. Red also shows our willingness to bleed.

Everyday more flesh leaves our bones. They all leave. The people we love—only out of habit, for contentment. The people we love—only out of respect, for blood shared. Even our own flesh leaves us when we stress. God leaves us when his sky path goes dark. And he waits for us to die so he can peck away. But we don’t know if there’s holy flavor left in us anymore.

Bankrupting Sky Banks is an introspective work inspired by the infamous Borgia family. A half-burned invitation written to God.

We are the prey that prays.

Advance Praise

“A shocking, scandalous, searing story, made all the more visceral by the fact that it has its roots in true history, Hofstatter’s Bankrupting Sky Banks is an extraordinary foray into the dark and deceptive world of the Borgias.”   —Christa Carmen, Bram Stoker Award-winning & Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island