The Mood Librarian Tells Stories is a retelling of One Thousand and One Nights set in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The hybrid text combines poems, creative prose, critical fabulations, and transcription in nesting “narratives” linked by themes that reflect on storytelling as resistance, language as memory, and strategies for Black remembering and “self-possession.” Just as is true in the Nights, the storytelling carries significant stakes and must be successful (even if it diverges from the expected) to forestall the death of a sister or lover, the death of a femme, or the potential “deaths” of the many womyn targets of the Boss’s misogynist (and anti-Black and xenophobic) scapegoating. I anticipate using the Rome Prize to complete the overall design of the frame for this project, moving between the outline and the task of generating and tuning existing drafts for pace, enactment, and emotion.