Jesmyn Ward is arguably the most important contemporary American author. Versatile, brilliant, elegant, she is a master of both fiction and non-fiction. She’s the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and she twice won the National Book Award for fiction. SING, UNBURIED, SING is a novel about a young bi-racial boy on terrifying road trip through Mississippi with his checked-out mother, his baby sister, and the ghosts (literally) of his family’s wrecked past. Ward is regularly compared to Faulkner — and for very good reason. This novel is simply epic.
Trethewey is one of the most celebrated poets in America today. She won the Pulitzer Prize, and also served as our country’s Poet Laureate for two term. MEMORIAL DRIVE is her memoir about the story that has haunted her for decades — the murder of her mother, back in the 1980s, by an abusive partner. This is one of the most delicately and beautiful-constructed memoirs I’ve ever read, and it’s also an education about what it means to be bi-racial girl raised in the Deep South.
Dr. Trent (whom Oprah once called the favorite guest she’d every interviewed) is simply the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met. Raised in poverty in Zimbabwe, the victim of both racist and patriarchal abuses, Dr. Trent was married off at age 14, and had three children by the time she was 20. Yet she had a dream: To get a Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degree, and to return to her community and build schools for girls like herself. This memoir shows how she did it, and encourages all women to live by their dreams.
This is a beautifully-executed collection of essays about Bernard’s experience as a Black woman moving through traditionally white spaces in America (especially academia, and the entire State of Vermont.) It’s also a memoir of the deep love that passes between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters — and a story of how both friendship and marriage can heal intergenerational wounds.
Dr. Harper is one of the mere 2% of Black women doctors working in America — and she’s on the front lines, as an Emergency Room doctor. In this exquisitely-written, incredibly humane, and inspiring memoir, she tells the story of how she found healing for her own wounds by becoming a healer of others. She also discusses the institutional racism within the medical community, and the ways in which poverty and oppression are medical issue within themselves.
