Tricia Hersey

Tricia Hersey is an American poet, performance artist, and activist best known as the founder of the organization The Nap Ministry. She refers to herself as the Nap Bishop and advocates for the importance of rest as a racial and social justice issue.

Early life and education
Hersey was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. She received her bachelor's degree in public health from Eastern Illinois University. Hersey completed two years of service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.

Hersey enrolled in divinity school at Candler School of Theology at Emory University as protests related to Black Lives Matter were beginning. After she experienced stress related to her graduate program, deaths in her family, and being robbed with her young son, Hersey began taking naps more often. She was also influenced by the memory of her grandmother, who meditated regularly in Hersey's childhood. The additional rest made her feel healthier and more energized, and she began to incorporate rest into her graduate research topics of black liberation theology, somatics, and cultural trauma. Hersey received a Master of Divinity degree from the Candler School of Theology.

Career
Hersey's work argues that sleep deprivation is a racial and social justice issue, and calls for rest as a form of resistance to white supremacy and capitalism. Hersey ties rest to American slavery, when enslaved Africans were regularly sleep deprived, and believes that rest disrupts that history and contemporary "grind culture". She contends that rest is key to Black liberation because it allows space for healing and invention. Hersey has tied Black exhaustion to continued experiences of oppression. Prior to founding the Nap Ministry, Tricia Hersey has had other occupations such as an educator at Chicago public schools where she taught poetry. Hersey also wrote and performed poetry in Chicago.

The Nap Ministry
Hersey founded The Nap Ministry in 2016, an organization that advocates for rest as a form of reparations and a pathway to ancestral connection. The organization seeks to de-stigmatize self-care and sleep. She was inspired by an artistic performance that explores how rest can connect to reparations, resistance and connect us to our ancestors. Hersey also advocates for rest to be a form of healing from traumatic experiences. She spent the first year networking and developing the organization, and hosted the first nap experience in May 2017. Hersey refers to herself as the Nap Bishop and has described the organization as spiritual rather than religious.

The organization hosts collective napping experiences based in Atlanta, where people nap together for 30–40 minutes. At the collective napping experiences, the people attending are given yoga mats, pillows, and blankets. As the music plays in the background, Hersey begins these experiences with a meditation and closes out with a group discussion. Hersey has also hosted pop-up sessions in Chicago. During the pandemic, the Nap Ministry's social media pages started to become more popular as she shared her ideas and promoted the importance of rest. As of May 2024, the Nap Ministry has 549,000 followers on Instagram.

In 2022, Hersey published her first book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, where she goes into depth about her philosophy on the importance of rest. A year after, Hersey published a tarot-style card deck called, The Nap Ministry's Rest Deck: 50 Practices to Resist Grind Culture.

Personal life
Hersey resides in Atlanta with her husband. She has a son.