LaShonda Katrice Barnett

Narrator Phylicia Rashad gives such a vivid portrayal of the characters in this audiobook that you feel you are in the same room with them, only you’ve turned your head and don’t happen to be seeing them. It’s as if she’s known every one of them personally. Ivoe Williams is a capable and determined daughter of early-twentieth-century Jim Crow Texas. As a young woman, she starts an African-American newspaper, JAM ON THE VINE, in Kansas City, Missouri.

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. Within the confines of a few hundred pages, it can be difficult for a character to be read as bisexual unless explicitly mentioned. Too often, if a character is dating someone of the same sex they are seen as gay, and if not, they are assumed to be straight.

Sometimes the only way to right wrongs is to write about them… In the late nineteenth century, African-Americans may have been emancipated, but they could hardly proclaim their freedom―and segregation was not something to Jim Crow about. Young Ivoe Williams, who is at once idealistic, realistic, and journalistic, is determined to subjugate this oppression. Once she typesets her sights on a career as a reporter, there’s no stopping the presses.