Come By Here - A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast

In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.

In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire’s hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area’s long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick’s Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.

In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home’s collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde’s advice: “It is better to speak.”

List of contents

Contents

KINDRED
Hometown Memories
Finding Grandma
A Treatise On Black Women’s Tears
Water Is Life
September
A Rolling Stone/Papa Was
A Brush With Magic Or An Ode To Mrs. Cornelia
Baskets

BLOODY MARSHES
How To Divide A Coastal Georgia Town
The Power Of Hate
The Confederate’s Son
Running On King Cotton Row

RELIGION & RESISTANCE
Reproduction
Trouble The Water The Curse Reclamation
Stealing Sheetrock
Facts Of A Black Girl’s Life
Dancing In The Wind

References
Acknowledgements

About the author

Neesha Powell-Ingabire (she & they) is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, and community & cultural organizer living in Atlanta/traditional Muscogee territory. She’s the director of popular education at Press On, a Southern movement media collective. Neesha reports on the justice movements of the Black, trans, queer, and Southern communities to which she belongs and writes essays to recover her own history and the histories of her ancestors and their ancestral homes. Her writings have been published in various online and print publications, including Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Scalawag, and VICE. Learn more about Neesha's work at neeshawrites.com. They currently live in Fairburn, GA.

Summary

In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.

In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire’s hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area’s long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick’s Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.

In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home’s collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde’s advice: “It is better to speak.”

Foreword

Marketing Plans

CONFIRMED: 2/9 Ms. Magazine - Most Anticipated roundup
CONFIRMED: Poets & Writers - September/October issue - seventh annual New Nonfiction roundup of the best debut memoirs and essay collections of 2024
CONFIRMED: Interview on All Things Considered, Georgia Public Broadcasting
CONFIRMED: Interview on the Laura Flanders Show, American Public Television
CONFIRMED: 8/15 Kirkus, review
CONFIRMED: Southern Review of Books
CONFIRMED: Electric Lit, excerpt
PENDING: Bookriot

Regional Newspapers
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Atlanta), Chapter16 (Tennessee papers), Seattle Times (Seattle), Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Public Radio Pitch
WABE City Lights (ATL), GPB / All Things Considered

Events / Early Indie Next Push
GA - Charis Books & More, September 24 (CONFIRMED book launch)
GA - Macon Historical Society, October 3 (CONFIRMED)
GA - Avid Bookshop
SC- Hub City Bookshop
SC - Turning Page
WA - Seattle bookstore

Book festivals pitch
Bookmarks (Winston-Salem), Southern Festival of Books, Oct., Miami Book Festival, Texas Book Fest, Charleston Literary Festival

Prizes
Awards push to: National Book Award, National Book Critic Circle, Jean Stein, ALA, Lambda

Publicity and Outreach

• Outreach to enthusiastic readers of adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Neema Avashia, Sarah M. Broom, Kiese Laymon, and other prominent nonfiction authors


• eGalleys available on Edelweiss


• Seeking coverage in monthly magazines, newspapers, and radio/podcasts: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Star-Tribune, NPR and more


• Outreach to African American studies programs, college-level courses for course adoption


• Expected coverage in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, among others

Product details

• Authors: Neesha Powell-Ingabire
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 27.08.2024, delayed
• EAN: 9798885740388
• ISBN: 979-8-88574-038-8
• No. of pages: 264
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; HISTORY / African American & Black, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Activism & Social Justice, homecoming;intersectionality;BLM;civil rights;preservation