She didn't see her Black heritage in crossword puzzles. So she started publishing her own
It all started a couple of years ago when Juliana Pache got stuck while doing a crossword puzzle, the clue making a reference she wasn’t familiar with
NEW YORK — It started a couple of years ago when Juliana Pache was doing a crossword puzzle and got stuck.
She was unfamiliar with the reference that the clue made. It made her think about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more of some subjects that she WAS familiar with, thanks to her own identity and interests — Black history and Black popular culture.
When she couldn't find such a thing, Pache decided to do it herself. In January 2023, she created blackcrossword.com, a site that offers a free mini-crossword puzzle every day. And Tuesday marked the release of her first book, “Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora.”
It's a good moment for it, nearly 111 years after the first crossword appeared in a New York newspaper. Recent years have seen an increasing amount of conversation around representation in crossword puzzles, from who's constructing them to what words can be used for answers and how the clues are framed. There's been a push to expand the idea of the kinds of “common knowledge” players would have to fill them out.
“I had never made a crossword puzzle before,” Pache, 32, said with a laugh. “But I was like, I can figure it out.”
And she did.
Each puzzle on Pache's site includes at least a few clues and answers connecting to Black culture. The tagline on the site: “If you know, you know.”
The book is brimming with the kinds of puzzles that she estimates about 2,200 people play daily on her site — squares made up of five lines, each with five spaces. She aims for at least three of the clues to be
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