Throughout Brazil, many Afro-Brazilian voices are clamoring for an audience and for inclusion within a racial divide and psychosocial fragmentation that continue to hinder political representation and empowerment of the vast majority. In spite of the challenges, it is satisfying to listen to these voices in many regions and come to the realization that regardless of the geographical disparateness, stylistic diversity, and differing thematic concerns, there is at least a sense of aesthetic unity among Afro-Brazilian cultural producers. Their respective location notwithstanding—be it Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Recife, or Maranhão—these cultural “Quilombolas” (dwellers of the runaway settlement during slavery) imagine a free world through their writings, attempting to move beyond the burden of blackness and prejudice, asserting a creative and spiritual energy even when the odds against cultural production are significant. Of about two dozen Afro-Brazilian writers I interviewed in my excursions into these “regional” cultural “Quilombos” (runaway settlements), I have selected only a few for in-depth analysis. Regardless of these writers' locations, to define them according to their region would be misleading, as most of their works do not display a particular regional consciousness but, rather, an aesthetic unity marked by the evocation of survival coupled with expressive protest against discrimination. Even when some of them, like Ricardo Aleixo of Minas Gerais and Ronald Tutuca of Rio Grande do Sul, experiment with visual images and postmodernist eccentricities, they remain bound by their African heritage and grounding—for example, Aleixo's evocation of òrìṣàs in A roda do mundo.