Join Loyalty in welcoming Shayla Lawson and Evita Turquoise Robinson for a VIRTUAL event to celebrate the release of How to Live Free in a Dangerous World! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast and is free to attend. Click here to register for the event. You can also order the book from our website to be added to the event's registration list, and there will also be an option to snag the book during the event.

“Phenomenal.... A memoir that opens into the world, with brilliance, courage, and elegant prose.... This is a book to read, read again, and remember.”—Imani Perry, New York Timesbestselling author of the National Book Award winner South to America

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

In their new book, Shayla Lawson reveals how traveling can itself be a political act, when it can be a dangerous world to be Black, femme, nonbinary, and disabled. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self.

Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year’s Eve in Mexico City, Lawson’s travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal.

Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location—and their deepest emotions—to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms.

Shayla Lawson is the author of This Is Major, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a LAMBDA Literary Award, as well as two poetry collections. Lawson has written for New York magazine, Salon, ESPN, and Paper, and earned fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. They reside in Lexington, Kentucky. They’ve “lived” everywhere.

Evita Turquoise Robinson is a creative and cultural entrepreneur. In September 2011, Evita created the NOMADNESS Travel Tribe, an award winning online social community primarily for travelers of color. NOMADNESS was the first of its kind targeting Black and brown millennials. From the success of the online group, Evita Robinson has garnered partnerships with top brands and destinations around the world. This includes Issa Rae, who she Co- Executive Produced The NOMADNESS Project web series on YouTube in 2013.

Evita’s accolades include National Geographic’s ‘21 Most Visionary Women Throughout Travel History’, AFAR Travel Vanguard Award recipient, The Root 100, and being noted as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s 50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs of 2018. Evita was also invited to the White House under the Obama Administration for their meeting of world's creative change makers, for SXSL (South By South Lawn). In 2017, she was inducted into the third cohort of the TED Residency, and gave her noted TED Talk that June. Given her work within Black travel data research with Dr. Alana Dillette and Dr. Stefanie Benjamin of Tourism RESET, she is also a published scholar in the academic journal Tourism Geographies.

She now serves as an award winning host of various travel series’ for diversified destination marketing and tourism campaigns. Her focus now is hosting, writing and producing for the screen – taking fifteen years of international travel, community building, and cultural immersion to amplify the stories of those most forgotten.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during virtual or in-person events.

Shayla Lawson and Evita Turquoise Robinson for HOW TO LIVE FREE IN A DANGEROUS WORLD