morgan jerkins wandering in strange lands

Can you talk a little bit about that moment and how it related to your journey of writing this book? Kendra: In the beginning of the book, you give an anecdote about how one day your father pulled out a photo and said, “These are your sisters.” And you had never heard that you had had sisters before. And like I said, there’s so much at stake. And that really spoke to me because even though I’d never been to some of these places, I realized, like, still it’s a part of me. Hence the title Wandering in Strange Lands, which is also from a line from an Arna Bontemps poem, where he speaks about, you know, there’s something that we have forgotten. And I thought about, well, why did we will move? Why do we continue to move? And what does that speak to our resilience? And yeah, it was like throughout the creation of this book, I realized that I was traveling to places that that I had never been before. And I always believed that much movement characterizes so much of African American life. It was a part of a larger context of Black American experiences that are similar, but not so similar that there’s still some distinctions there. And, you know, there were other participants like my mother made an appearance in there, friends of my sisters.īut this one I wanted to explore more because I knew that my story was larger. And perhaps in certain ways, it was claustrophobic. I mean, there’s still a personal element, for sure. Well, I will say I feel like this book is night and day from my essay collection. Kendra: what was it like tackling this project that is more of a continuous narrative versus your essay collection?

Kendra talks to Morgan Jerkins about her latest book, Wandering in Strange Lands, which is out now from Harper.

Morgan jerkins wandering in strange lands