Category: Autobiography

  • It’s Not All Black and White: Multiracial Youth Speak Out Annick Press 2012 120 pages Softcover ISBN 13: 9781554513802 St. Stephen’s Community House Toronto, Ontario, Canada Through poems, interviews, and short essays, a group of young people tell what it’s like to be biracial, multiracial, or of mixed race. These poignant firsthand accounts reflect the…

  • Interview: Jackie Kay The Journal Newcastle upon Tyne 2013-03-30 Jackie Kay is about to be read in places most writers never reach. David Whetstone spoke to her. YOU can imagine there are lots of things a writer dreams of – literary prizes, lucrative deals, maybe a film adaptation. But a different accolade has come the…

  • The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo Bedford/St. Martin’s 2013 208 pages Paper ISBN-10: 0-312-60762-8; ISBN-13: 978-0-312-60762-3 George Appo (1856-1930) Edited with an Introduction by: Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Professor of History Loyola University, Chicago Through the colorful autobiography of pickpocket and con man George Appo, Timothy Gilfoyle brings to…

  • Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands James Blackwood Paternoster Row 1857 198 pages Mary Seacole (1805-1881) Mary Seacole was born a free black woman in Jamaica in the early nineteenth century. In her long and varied life, she travelled in Central America, Russia, and Europe; found work as an inn-keeper and as a…

  • Lyn Dickens relates her experiences of being a young Eurasian woman in Australia

  • I have never had the comfort zone of a given racial identity. My mother is a Bostonian white woman of WASP heritage. My father is a Louisiana black man of mixed African and Mexican heritage. Unlike people who are automatically classified as black or white, I have always been up for debate. I am forever having…

  • The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White University of Iowa Press April 2013 144 pages 5 ¾ x 9 ¼ Paper ISBN: 1-60938-160-2; 978-1-60938-160-8 Aisha Sabatini Sloan In these intertwined essays on art, music, and identity, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, the daughter of African American and Italian American parents,…

  • Divided To The Vein: A Journey into Race and Family Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 1996 320 pages Hardcover ISBN-10: 0151931070; ISBN-13: 978-0151931071 Scott Minerbrook Scott Minerbrook’s parents hail from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. His father was a pampered only child born into Chicago’s aspiring black bourgeoisie, while his mother was an idealistic girl from…

  • Ten Thousand Sorrows Bantam Books 2000 240 pages Paperback ISBN-10: 0553812645; ISBN-13: 978-0553812640 Elizabeth Kim ‘I don’t know how old I was when I watched my mother’s murder, nor do I know how old I am today.’ The illegitimate daughter of a peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth Kim spent her early years as a…

  • Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992 W. W. Norton & Company 1994 318 pages Hardcover ISBN-10: 0393034046; ISBN-13: 978-0393034042 Paperback ISBN: ISBN 978-0-393-31155-6 Yelena Khanga (with Susan Jacoby) As the Soviet Union crumbled in early 1991, a young Russian woman in search of her past found her way to Mississippi, to the…