Reclaiming UGLY!

VANESSA ROCHELLE LEWIS is a Queer, Fat, Black, Femme performer, facilitator, educator, writer, activist, healer, joyful weirdo, and Faerie Princess Mermaid Gangsta for The Revolution. Lewis has danced across many professional and creative stages. She has been a writer and co-managing editor for acclaimed feminist magazines, Everyday Feminism and Black Girl Dangerous; a community college instructor at multiple Bay Area schools and radical transformative justice programs; a fundraiser and events coordinator for the Black Healing October, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project; and more. Lewis is a shameless flirt who loves to swoon over life and dive deep into intimacy. Silliness and sensuality are her survival strategies. She loves the people that society forgot to love the most.

Lewis founded the organization Reclaim UGLY: Uplift Glorify Love Yourself--And Create A World Where Everyone Else Can As Well! Her vision is to co-create a world where everyone knows that they are a safe, welcomed, and valued member of their communities; has the support to dream authentically and exists in their truths; and accepts that there is no face, no body, and no person who is ugly or unworthy of love and acceptance.

"Healing comes only when we face the deep harms of which we have been subject and perpetrator. Reclaiming UGLY! is an invitation to heal both the internal and external wounds of uglification. With a grace born of profound empathy, Vanessa never blames us for drinking from the chalice of shame and cruelty as she knows we all have thirsted for belonging, care, and love amidst oppressive structures that have left us few options. Reclaiming UGLY! is a necessary drink of liberatory possibility; a world formed of immense beauty and transformative love; a world we each get to co create. Lucky us."
Sonya Renee Taylor, New York Times best-selling author of The Body Is Not an Apology

"With Reclaiming UGLY!, Vanessa Rochelle Lewis is offering us her hand as we look in the mirror and learn to see the beauty there, and the beauty in everyone, shirking off societal norms that deny our multitudinous, miraculous nature. Looking at the creation, maintenance, and impact of uglification through a lens that includes the personal, cultural, and factual, Vanessa shows us a way forward toward compassion and revolutionary love."
adrienne maree brown, New York Times best-selling author of Pleasure Activism

"The wisdom of this book is borne of a deeply personal story told with such clarity and love that we are thankfully implicated and freed by it all at the same time. Vanessa s writing is a mirror where each page rescues a bit more of our reflections from the lies and dangers of lookism. The framework here is ultimately one that teaches us how to recover what in us has been made out as ugly by this society, to interrupt the harm to each other we perpetuate in its name, and how, ultimately, we reclaim an ethic of care, deep honor, and protection. Vanessa has given us a generous, liberating provocation and invitation with Reclaiming UGLY! that we would do ourselves a service to receive."
Prentis Hemphill, author, therapist, founder of The Embodiment Institute, and host of the