How Juliana Pache's 'Black Crossword' Book Is Changing the Puzzle Game

By Meagan Jordan

When I — a crossword beginner — do the Aug. 14 puzzle on Blackcrossword.com, I briefly fumble on one clue: “Turner from Tennessee.” The four-letter (and now obvious) answer is Tina. Later, when I crack open Juliana Pache’s book Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora, I instantly recognize the answer to the clue for puzzle three, five down, which says “Private Dancer,” a song I’m familiar with. I know quickly that the answer is also Tina.

“What you’re describing is how your brain is making new associations. Things are being worded differently and you’re now able to make those connections faster,” Pache explains later. She’s the entrepreneur and creator behind Black Crossword. For nearly a decade, she’s been an avid crossword player, gaining her interest in the game by watching her co-workers compete. In January 2023 , she created blackcrossword.com, and now, her new book Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora extends the concept, allowing players to exercise the brain’s knowledge of Black diasporic concepts, places, and celebrities. Some of these words you’ve heard, and others you will get to know. In Pache’s book, we’re thinking Black.

The pages inside Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora feature puzzles and clues that touch on hip-hop, African spiritual deities, and popular phrases within Black households. “Blackness is at the center, that’s what makes it so unique and fun to work on,” Pache says. For this project, I don’t have or want to think about how anyone else [outside of Blackness] responds or receives it. That doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible. Everyone is welcome to play this puzzle, but this puzzle is made with Black people in mind.”

Before moving to Florida for high school, Pache was born and partially raised in Queens, New York. For as long as she can remember, she always had an affinity for words. Many of her high school hours were spent working at the library and pouring into books that taught her about her Afro-Latina history. Her parents came to America as first-generation immigrants, her father coming from the Dominican Republic and her enated — another word from the book, meaning “maternal family” — coming from Cuba. Life in Queens was enriching for Pache, whose youth in the “the world’s borough” exposed her to the worlds of her neighbors, literally.

“I interacted with a lot of different Black cultures and cultures in general,” recalls Pache. “It was very normal for us to know a little bit about each other’s culture, and I think that’s what’s special about New York. You can go to a party and hear Black music from everywhere, and everyone will know a little bit about a lot.” This is the foundation of Black Crossword.

The 100 Mini Puzzles book started from a place of feeling unseen. It was October 2022, and Pache had been doing her daily New York Times Mini when she got stuck on a word. “I don’t remember what the clue was,” she says. “But it was very white, which is fine because any kind of clue can be in a crossword puzzle. But there was something about this clue that day that made me think ‘It would be so cool if there was a Black-culture-specific puzzle that had some of our cultural references in there.’”

She opted to fill the space. “I found some really outdated things, so I was like ‘I’m just going to start it.’” In 2020, Pache had already started a jewelry-making business, which she would later quit her social media day job for (She was previously Rolling Stone’s social media director.) She felt well equipped to run another project; blackcrossword.com became a platform where anyone can play crossword minis for free every day.

Leaning in to her digital expertise to curate the actual puzzle, Pache tuned into YouTube videos, learning how to make crosswords by hand, a very grueling and yet impressive skill. “The instructor made it look very simple, but it’s harder than it looks,” she admits. “You can start with a word or theme and then you’ll block some of the spaces around it.” But for the sake of time, Pache often uses websites like Amuse Labs to do her curating, and she inputs words from her “word library” — a list she adds to with vocabulary words, phrases, and people from the Black diaspora.

By next year, Pache will have her second crossword book on shelves, and she’s also in the early stages of turning the book into a television project. “The skills that I developed over the years aligned for this work,” she says.

Prior to Black Crossword, I had always felt crosswords were intimidating and out of reach. But what’s true is crosswords, like many “standardized” tests and games in our society, haven’t been curated to fit the diversified experiences of players. Pache sees her puzzles as a way of creating Black safe spaces where everyone gets the same cultural references. “We don’t have to explain, we just get it, and that’s what I want for these puzzles. I want that to be the foundation and feeling, and we can still learn things here.”