Black Nurse Joy.
In Houston, We're
Reclaiming
Our Right to Thrive.
Black Nurse Joy: Reclaiming Our Right to Thrive
This year, we gathered around Restoring What’s Owed in Tulsa, OK. We confronted the history, the harm, the inequities, and the weight Black nurses have carried for generations.
But restoration was never meant to be the end of the story.
The natural evolution is deciding what we do with what has been restored.
Now, we reclaim our right to thrive.
We rest. We choose ourselves. We build lives beyond survival. We make room for fulfillment, connection, freedom, and joy.
Black Nurse Joy isn't pretending everything is okay. It's refusing to let what we've endured define how we live.
The 2027 Black Nurses Week Conference is the next chapter: a culturally rooted, in-person experience centered on what it looks like for Black nurses to truly thrive, professionally, personally, and collectively.
Next year, we’re making room for the whole Black nurse. Not just the professional. Not just the caregiver. Not just the strong one.
The person underneath it all.
Black Nurse Joy.
Reclaiming Our Right to Thrive
Step into a room where we can talk honestly about what happens when your joy is chipped away piece by piece. In 2027, we’re naming what has diminished you, questioning what you’ve learned to accept, and helping you reclaim your right to thrive.
Want your brand in the room? Interested in bringing your brand into this experience?
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2027 Speakers To Be Announced
We’re thoughtfully curating the voices who will help shape the 2027 Black Nurses Week Conference experience. Speakers, conversations, and session details will be announced as the program takes shape.
What happens when you are in the room.
This isn’t a traditional nursing conference, and it isn’t designed to feel like one. The experience is intentionally built around conversations, reflection, connection, and the parts of being a Black nurse that rarely make it onto a conference agenda.
This is not your traditonal nursing conference
You won’t spend three days sitting through presentations that could have been a webinar. The learning matters, but so does what happens between the sessions, what gets stirred up in the room, what you finally give yourself permission to say out loud, and what you discover about yourself in the process.
The whole Black nurse belongs here
Not just your title. Not just your credentials. Not just the version of you that knows how to show up, perform, lead, care for everyone else, and keep going. We make room for the person underneath the scrubs, because reclaiming your right to thrive requires tending to more than your career.
Connection you can feel
There is something powerful about being in a room where you don’t have to explain your experience before you can be understood. Come alone if you need to. Between the conversations, laughter, reflection, and moments you didn’t plan for, strangers become familiar and connections become community you can carry with you long after Houston.
The 2027 experience is being intentionally curated.
More Than Sessions
This isn’t three days of sitting through presentations. Expect experiences designed to engage your mind, body, curiosity, creativity, and the parts of you that don’t always get attention when you’re busy taking care of everything and everyone else.
Conversations With Substance
Joy doesn’t require us to avoid what’s difficult. Expect honest conversations that challenge what we’ve normalized, explore what has shaped us, and make room to think differently about what it means to thrive.
Room to Actually Experience It
Every minute doesn’t need to be programmed. We’re intentionally creating room to reflect, connect, rest, explore Houston, and enjoy the experience without feeling like you’re missing the conference you came for.
And We’re Not Done Yet
The 2027 experience is still being curated. Some of what we’re planning deserves to be revealed when it’s ready. Just know we’re building an experience worth coming to Houston for.
Founder-Led Experience
A Conversation With the Founder
Some conversations are too important to hand off to someone else.
In 2027, Tauqilla will lead a conversation rooted in the theme Black Nurse Joy: Reclaiming Our Right to Thrive.
This won’t be a highlight reel or a conversation about having it all figured out. It will be an honest look at what it means to question what you’ve accepted, make different choices, and create more room for yourself in a profession and a world that can ask you to give so much of who you are.
The full conversation is still taking shape, but one thing is certain: we’re going somewhere deeper than the surface.
Tauqilla Manning, MBA, BSN, RN
Founder & Conference Host, Black Nurses Week®
View Full Bio →
A new city for the next chapter.
In 2026, Tulsa connected us to a history that demanded we look back. In 2027, Houston gives us space to ask a different question: What does it look like to move forward and truly thrive?
We’re bringing Black Nurse Joy to a city known for its culture, diversity, energy, and unmistakable Black presence. A place where there is room to gather, experience, explore, and reconnect with parts of yourself that nursing doesn’t always leave room for.
Tulsa helped us examine what was owed. Houston is where we begin exploring what it means to reclaim what is ours.
Bring Your Brand Into This Room
Align with a highly engaged community of Black nurses, leaders, and changemakers in a space built for visibility, connection, and real impact.
This is not for everyone, but you'll know if it's for you.
This space is for the Black nurse who has learned how to keep going, even when the cost of doing so has shown up in ways no one else can see. The confidence that does not feel the same. The exhaustion that follows you home. The parts of yourself you stopped tending to because there was always something or someone else demanding more.
Begin imagining what your 2027 experience could look like
The 2027 experience is still being intentionally curated, but we want you to have an early look at how the weekend is taking shape. Expect meaningful conversations, space to reflect, curated experiences, real connection, and moments that remind you there is more to being a Black nurse than what you have had to endure. Final schedule and experience details will be released as the conference approaches. Schedule subject to change.
Friday, July 30
The conference begins with a full day together in the room. Expect honest conversations, reflection, and sessions that go beneath the surface of what can interfere with our ability to thrive, while creating space to consider what becomes possible when we begin choosing differently.
Saturday, July 31
Saturday will blend learning with experience. The day is being designed with more room to engage, explore, connect, rest, and experience Houston without every minute being filled simply for the sake of programming.
Saturday Evening
Then we change the energy. The Remix returns as the Black Nurses Week signature social experience, bringing music, laughter, culture, connection, and Black Nurse Joy into the room in a completely different way.
Sunday, August 1
We return to the room for the final day of conversations, reflection, connection, and integration as we bring the weekend back to the question at the center of it all: What does it mean to reclaim your right to thrive?
Travel Information
Houston is served by:
George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH)
William P. Hobby Airport (HOU)
Conference venue and hotel information will be announced soon.
The REMIX
Black Nurses Week® Signature Event
The REMIX is where we put the conference conversations down for a minute and change the energy. Our signature karaoke-style, sing-along experience brings Black nurses together for music, laughter, dancing, connection, and the songs we all know the minute the beat drops. No networking agenda. No professional titles needed. Just come ready to sing too loud, dance if the song calls for it, and experience Black Nurse Joy in the room.
Dress Code: DENIM
Decide how you want to experience the room.
If you’ve made it this far, something about this conference is already speaking to you. Choose the experience that gives you the access, connection, and space you want when we gather in Houston.
Super Early Bird pricing ends December 31, 2026. Pay in full and save $100. Payment plans include a $100 administrative fee.
All payment plans must be completed prior to the conference.
Maybe this is the room you didn't know you needed.
Three days. One room. No pretending. Come as you are and experience Black Nurses Week® for yourself.