Donna Hemans
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Articles by Donna Hemans
This Novel Asks How Do Survivors Seek Justice When Society Looks Away
Skip to content interviews Christine Murphy confronts the moral dilemmas of sexual violence and vengeance in "Notes on Surviving the Fire" In Christine Murphy’s debut novel, Notes on Surviving the Fire, Ph.D. student Sarah Common is struggling to complete her thesis and survive the last year of her academic program with few resources. In fact, Sarah has little support across all areas of her life. Her academic advisor doesn’t care and is possibly plagiarizing her students.
How a Chance Rescue Saved Zora Neale Hurston's Unpublished Novel From Turning into Ashes
Skip to content interviews Editor Deborah Plant discusses the process of bringing "The Life of Herod the Great" to publication When Zora Neale Hurston died in January 1960, much of her belongings, including a trunk holding her papers, were burned. But in a series of fortuitous circumstances, a neighbor and friend salvaged some of Hurston’s papers, which were later turned over to the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The House of Plain Truth
. Jan. 2024. 10:39 hrs. ISBN 9781958506257. $15.99. F COPY ISBN The poet Cicero said, “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” No one knows this better than Rupert Greaves’s living children, as they are faced with his sudden death and a new awareness of the broken trail of his history, which stretches from Cuba to New York to Jamaica. Pearline has returned home from New York to nurse her ailing father, only to hear his dying wish of finding his long-lost children.
FIRST Book Club: 7 Feel-Great Reads You’ll Love for April 26th - May 2nd, 2024
Welcome, literature lovers, to the FIRST for Women weekly book club! Here at FIRST for Women, when we’re not hard at work bringing you stories about health, nutrition, beauty and lifestyle, we like to kick back with a good book. We know firsthand that reading provides relief from stress, improves brain health and ushers in more joy. So we rounded up our editors’ top seven book picks — of new and old favorites — for April 26th – May 2nd, 2024.
from The House Of Plain Truth
After decades of living in Brooklyn, Pearline, the protagonist of Donna Hemans’ The House of Plain Truth, returns to Jamaica to nurse her father through his final days and reclaim her childhood home. Instead, she finds herself at odds with her sisters who view her as an outsider. On his deathbed, her father tasks her with solving the mystery of what happened to the children he was forced to abandon in Cuba while working as a migrant laborer sixty years before.
8 Books on Love, Loss, and Betrayal in the Caribbean
Reading Lists Donna Hemans, author of "The House of Plain Truth," recommends Caribbean family sagas that expand the definition of "family" Growing up, I often thought of my mother as a collector of people. She collected people the way other people collect things. So it was never just us five—my parents and their three girls.
Safiya Sinclair's Journey to Finding Her Own Power
conversations In her memoir "How to Say Babylon," the poet rejects the burden of being the perfect daughter and breaks free from her Rastafarian upbringing Safiya Sinclair writes in her memoir How to Say Babylon, “The perfect daughter was nothing but a vessel for the man’s seed, unblemished clay waiting for Jah’s fingerprint.” The memoir, Sinclair’s first, is about her journey to shaping a future that isn’t limited by the idea of the perfect daughter or Rastafari’s tenets.
Caribbean Writers You Need to Read This Summer
Caribbean Writers You Need to Read This Summer Seventeen years ago, June was officially designated as National Caribbean Heritage Month in the United States. Who better to help us celebrate than Donna Hemans? Born and raised in Jamaica, the award-winning author has transported countless readers to the islands through her fiction. Here, she introduces us to five other authors who tackle the region's rich culture and tangled history.
Caribbean Writers You Need to Read This Summer
Caribbean Writers You Need to Read This SummerHearst Owned "Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Seventeen years ago, June was officially designated as National Caribbean Heritage Month in the United States. Who better to help us celebrate than Donna Hemans? Born and raised in Jamaica, the award-winning author has transported countless readers to the islands through her fiction.
Job Counseling Sessions Gave Me Space to Tell My Story
Angie Cruz’s latest novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is a study of a class of forgotten women: the 55 to 65-year-olds who lost their jobs during the Great Recession and were never able to regain long-term employment. Cara Romero is one of these women. When the factory where Cara has worked for decades closes in 2007, she participates in a Senior Workforce Program through which participants receive unemployment benefits to subsidize prevocational training.
A Jamaican American Searches for Identity and Belonging in Miami - Electric Literature
The question at the heart of If I Survive You is “What are you?” Jonathan Escoffery’s debut collection of linked stories follows a Jamaican American family of mixed heritage that migrates to Miami in the 1970s.
Searching for Who We Want to Be: A Conversation with Trisha R. Thomas
Searching for Who We Want to Be: A Conversation with Trisha R. Thomas Trisha R. Thomas’s latest work of fiction is a departure from the Nappily Ever After contemporary fiction series for which is widely known. In What Passes as Love, a historical novel set in the Civil War era, Thomas delves into passing as white and the sacrifices enslaved peoples made to secure their freedom.
A Black Woman’s Quest to Trace Her Lineage
If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Lineage is complicated in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.
Belonging Is Everything: Talking with Georgina Lawton
Belonging Is Everything: Talking with Georgina Lawton “My teacher’s methods were most definitely trash, but that day she taught me a valuable lesson about race,” Georgina Lawton writes in her memoir Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth about Where I Belong.
Finding Firm Ground: A Conversation with Nadia Owusu
Finding Firm Ground: A Conversation with Nadia Owusu Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir, Aftershocks, is described as “a poetic genre-bending work that combines literary memoir and cultural history to grapple with the fault lines of identity, the meaning of home, the complexities of family, and the ripple effects, both personal and generational, of emotional trauma.” Owusu’s memoir opens with a memory of her mother’s departure.
Finding Firm Ground: A Conversation with Nadia Owusu
Finding Firm Ground: A Conversation with Nadia Owusu Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu’s debut memoir, Aftershocks, is described as “a poetic genre-bending work that combines literary memoir and cultural history to grapple with the fault lines of identity, the meaning of home, the complexities of family, and the ripple effects, both personal and generational, of emotional trauma.” Owusu’s memoir opens with a memory of her mother’s departure.
How the Past Echoes Through Our Lives
The operator-assisted collect call comes on a July morning in 1987. It’s still early, before 9 a.m., and except for the telephone ringing, the house is quiet, my younger sister and I the only ones at home. My father is on his way to work, or already there, and my older sister and mother are in Brooklyn, having left the previous day to get my sister settled in the city where she’ll complete her studies now that she has finished high school in Jamaica.
Secrets That Hold Us
1. “I didn’t grow up with my mother,” Mom tells me. We’re sitting on the front verandah looking out at the grass before us wilting in the afternoon sun and the dwarf coconut trees that line one side of the driveway. The coconut fronds dip with the breeze, revealing green-and yellow-husked coconuts. It’s hot on the verandah; the aluminum awning, put there years earlier to shield the sun and rain, traps the late afternoon heat as well. “I was 12 before I knew my mother,” she says.
Imagination as Oasis: A Conversation with Sulaiman Addonia
Imagination as Oasis: A Conversation with Sulaiman Addonia Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue, out now from Graywolf Press, lays bare the inner life of a refugee camp through the stories of Saba and her mute brother, Hagos. As a refugee, Saba is forced to give up school but she still longs for the future life she imagined for herself.
Living Memory Keepers: Talking with Alicia Elliott
Living Memory Keepers: Talking with Alicia Elliott Alicia Elliott’s essay collection, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, borrows its title from the Mohawk phrase for depression, “wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on.” Recounting a conversation with her sister who is now fluent in Mohawk, Elliott explains that the translation is not exact.
Masters of Movement: A Conversation with Morgan Jerkins
Masters of Movement: A Conversation with Morgan Jerkins “No one spoke about the past—the goal was to move forward and never look back,” Morgan Jerkins says of her family in the prologue to her latest book Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. Growing up in New Jersey primarily with her mother, Jerkins knew her family moved north during the Great Migration—the period spanning 1916 to 1970, when six million Black Americans fled the South.
Tea By The Sea by Donna Hemans — Rebel Women Lit
20.00 This title will be released by the publisher on June 9, 2020. A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth; an Episcopal priest with a daughter whose face he cannot bear to see; a mother weary of searching for her lost child: Tea by the Sea is their story—that of a family uniting and unravelling. To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must find the child’s father who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation.
Picking Meat From Tiny Bones: Coping with Coronavirus, Isolation and Aging Parents
View from Puerto Seco Beach, the bauxite plant in the distance. Fish is what my mother craves after the day’s radiation treatment, and from the passenger seat, she directs me to a roadside shop on the outer edge of Discovery Bay where fishermen sometimes sell the day’s catch—parrot, snapper and goat fish tied together in small bundles.
Your Schooling Is Your Voice: Talking with Abi Daré
Your Schooling Is Your Voice: Talking with Abi Daré In Abi Darè’s debut novel, The Girl with the Louding Voice, out this month from Dutton, fourteen-year-old Adunni fights for an education and the right to choose her own future. At the outset of the novel, Adunni’s mother, the primary breadwinner, has died and her father arranges her marriage to an older local man. Adunni’s owo-ori—her bride price—pays the family’s rent and provides food for her father and two male siblings.
A Brief Caribbean Reading List
Among the string of islands known as the Lesser Antilles lies St. Lucia, famous for the picturesque twin volcanic peaks—Gros Piton and Petit Piton—that rise sharply from the sea. Beyond the beaches and lush rainforests that draw tourists are the simple villages and remnants of a colonial past that inspired the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.
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