Description

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In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights' era atrocities through the story of her family's experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The result is a stunning work reflecting on race, criminalization, and the devastating consequences of a Black father's incarceration on his psyche and family, specifically his Black daughter. Told through a mixture of photography, ekphrasis, and erasure, Carter-Jones' powerful collection creates an extraordinary record of her family's life at a time of great suffering and upheaval.

About the Author

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Sheila Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep, the winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks Blackberry Cobbler Song and Crooked Star Dream Book and her poems have been published in numerous literary journals. She received her MFA from Carlow University where she facilitates writing workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic Program. Sheila Carter-Jones lives in Pittsburgh PA.