This Temple graduate’s mini online crosswords centered the Black experience. Now she has a two-book deal.

In crossword puzzles centering the Black experience, edges is the 5-letter word for baby hairs.

Maze is the four-letter name of the R&B group led by the late Frankie Beverly.

And man is the 3-letter last name for the rapper who goes by Method.

Crossword puzzle aficionados well-versed in Black culture cheese — another word for smile — while figuring out Temple University graduate Juliana Pache’s daily crossword online. Now Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers has released Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora. The paperback of mini crosswords released in August is the first of Pache’s two-book deal. The second Black Crossword is scheduled to come out in 2025 and will feature bigger, more challenging puzzles.

“I was solving the New York Times Mini one day and thought the clues didn’t feel very inclusive,” said Pache, 32, a lover of word games and trivia, and former social media manager for Rolling Stone. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing but I wanted a daily puzzle that spoke to my frame of reference.”

Interest in Black trivia — puzzles, board games, and trivia nights — is a bankable niche as game nights become popular pastimes and entrepreneurs, who don’t see their experiences reflected in popular brain teasers, create specialty products and experiences that quiz knowledge on Black identity. Culture Tags, Growing Up Black Memes, and Soul Trivia are just a few of the games available at Target and on Amazon, poised to become game night favorites.

Last week, New York City’s Lincoln Center hosted another in a series of Hip-hop Trivia nights. And we are seeing even more Black American culture-centred categories and clues on shows like Jeopardy, Lingo, and Family Feud.

In 2022, after searching the internet for a daily Black-themed mini crossword and coming up empty, Pache, who was making jewelry full time, bought the Blackcrossword.com domain. (University of Pennsylvania graduate and crossword puzzle maker Jan Buckner Walker is behind Blackcrosswords.com, but those puzzles can’t be played online.)

Pache’s first order of business was to create a word bank, a list of words, phrases, names, and actions that hit differently in Black cultures across the globe. Many of the words have dual meanings like Eve, that can be the answer to a clue for Adam’s wife or a reference to Philly’s own Who’s that Girl rapper. It includes names like Audre Lorde, the clue to which might include her quote: “When we are silent, we are still afraid, so it is better to speak.” And it’s heavy on historical words like AKA, the first Black sorority found in 1908 at Howard University that might be part of a clue for the answer: Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I have more than 3,000 words on my list and I’m adding new phrases and words every day.” Pache said.

Her clues are drawn from her own multicultural experience. Pache’s mom is from Cuba and her dad is from the Dominican Republic. She spent her teenage years in West Palm Beach, Fla. and attended Temple where she graduated in 2014 with a major in media studies. While there, she worked at the school library, where she was “constantly in the stacks looking, skimming, and checking out books about Black activist movements.”

“When I think about Temple and Philadelphia I think about all the things I learned at that time,” Pache said. “They create the foundation of the terms, clues, and references I use when building out a crossword puzzle.”

Pache launched Blackcrossword.com in January 2023, promoted it on social media — with an extra heavy presence on X. Her website was featured in the New York Times the following month. She releases a new puzzle each day. Sometimes she makes the puzzles in advance. (It takes a little under two hours to build the puzzle and write the clues for minis). Some days, it’s a deadline endeavor and she creates them hours before they are scheduled to post. She’s created about 800 puzzles including all the ones in her first book.

“I’ve repeated some clues mostly because certain words are just good connecting words,” Pache said. “But each puzzle is different.”

More than 4200 people solve the Black Crossword each day. Not as many as the millions who solve the New York Times Mini, but Pache knows her crossword is filling a niche. “It’s not really about the number of people,” Pache said. “It’s more about who is coming [to the site] and how they feel. Are they excited about it? Do they see themselves?”