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A probing essay collection that chronicles one woman’s complicated quest to find home in a fractured America, from the award-winning author of Lauded poet and essayist Chet’la Sebree;interrogates;these questions as she traverses an America that has always;had;a fraught relationship with;its;Black citizens.;Her journey takes her;from the shores of the Atlantic;to the prairies of the Midwest, to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, abroad, and then back again. Through these shifting landscapes, Sebree seamlessly weaves memoir with history and cultural criticism in a collection of essays bound by themes of movement, home, inheritance, and belonging. Growing up in a family that would pile into the;car;for lengthy excursions,;Sebree has always loved to travel; it''s in her marrow. Once she left her;parents'';home in Delaware, she rarely kept an address for more than two years and was more comfortable with a suitcase and an itinerary than the idea of a mortgage and;stillness;of settling down. Her life as a writer, scholar, poet, and professor;fed her hunger for exploration domestically and internationally while staving;off the pang that she never;quite felt at home anywhere.;That latter;fact became;increasingly unsettling;as;she desired to put down roots--both for herself,;and for the child she;began to consider bringing into the world as a single mother. Building on the work of scholars like;Saidiya;Hartman and Imani Perry,;Sebree navigates her relationship to a;place that was not made for her to survive, let alone thrive, as she dreams of new futures. In exploring this fracture, Sebree carves out space of her own through clear-eyed observations and fearless revelations.
About the author
Chet'la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, Field Study, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry. Her essays and poems have been anthologized in Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and others. Sebree is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.
