BOOKS
We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World
A brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota
Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in U.S. history. Essays and poems vividly reflect the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of worldwide demands for justice.
Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify
Once a pregnant sixteen-year-old incarcerated in the Minnesota juvenile justice system, now a celebrated writer, arts activist, and teacher, Carolyn Holbrook has heeded the call to tell the story of her life. In a memoir woven of moments of reckoning, she summons stories born of silence, stories held inside, untold stories stifled by pain or prejudice or ignorance.
Earth Angels
Carolyn Holbrook's EARTH ANGELS discovers, in the intimate spaces of daily life, contact points with visionary experience. As a mother, artist, daughter, sister, teacher, and an African-American elder, Holbrook's nonfiction unites worlds seen and unseen, domestic, intellectual, and supernatural, and weaves each narrative moment to its roots.
Hope in the Struggle: A Memoir
How a Black woman from Texas became one of the most well-known civil rights activists in Minnesota, detailing seven remarkable decades of fighting for fairness in voting, housing, education, and employment...A memoir about shouldering the cause of social justice during the darkest hours and brightest moments for civil rights in America—and, specifically, in Minnesota—Hope in the Struggle shines light on the difference one person can make.
Blues Vision
Anthology published: 2015
A surprising and compelling anthology that reveals complex realities—beautiful, infuriating, painful, and uplifting—as described by African American writers in Minnesota over the past century.
A Good Time for the Truth
Anthology Published: 2016
In this provocative book, sixteen of Minnesota’s best writers provide a range of perspectives on what it is like to live as a person of color in Minnesota. They give readers a splendid gift: the gift of touching another human being’s inner reality, behind masks and veils and politeness.
White Teachers / Diverse Classrooms
Anthology Published: 2011
White and Black teachers, and teachers of different races and ethnicities, here provide the essential theoretical background, and share their experiences and the approaches they have developed, to create the conditions – in both urban and suburban settings – that enable minority students to succeed.
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Journeys
Through profiles and photographs by renowned photographer, Wing Young Huie, the book documents the legacy of this exceptional program through the journeys of twenty recipients, including myself, who founded or led non profit arts, community development, educational and health centered agencies in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In addition, it speaks to the powerful, lasting effects the program has had on the lives of the recipients, their families, and of the communities they serve.