Kin: Practically True Stories

by V Efua Prince, V Efua Prince (Narrated by), Linna Carter (Narrated by), Karole Foreman (Narrated by), Dara Brown (Narrated by)

Overview

A dynamic kaleidoscope of story that honors the work of women.

Long-listed for the prestigious Carol Shields Prize for Fiction!

Kin is a story and a celebration of Black womanhood, of resistance, and of perseverance—while simultaneously an indictment of American history. Kin is a tree—alive in places, broken in others—that offers shelter for women seeking respite in the midst of family-making. This tree depicts family grafted together by blood, law, or choice; its stories are voiced through blues-infused poetry, one-act plays, oral history, and reportage that are combined to form an orchestra of Black history and re-memory.

Centered on the labor of women, the movement of women through lives and time, and the work of building associations that make up the home, this book takes up the rhythms and multifarious forms of its inspiration, Cane, the 1923 novel by Jean Toomer. The roots from which it all grows are the ancestors who ensure from the spirit realm that the family remains grounded and verdant, despite the manifold threats to its health and well-being. Kin is a tribute to forebearers, a beacon to those calling homes into being, and a strata of stories for children not yet born.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814351505
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	08/27/2024
Series:	Made in Michigan Writers Series
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

V Efua Prince is a professor of African American studies at Wayne State University who specializes in themes of home, women, and housework. She has previously served as a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University; a visiting scholar at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia; and Avalon Professor of Humanities at Hampton University. Her first book, Burnin' Down the House: Home in African American Literature, was recognized by Academia as a university press bestseller.

What People are Saying About This

author of This Removed Utopia - Dennis Etzel Jr.

Through an autobiographical, hybrid approach to storytelling in the company of Jean Toomer and Claudia Rankine, V Efua Prince challenges genre inKin as a means to resist and defy the form of the white-colonizing novel as other African American writers have in the past. Plays and poetic vignettes inhabit this collection as neighbors, as we meet people—sometimes through the speaker's account, other times through their own voice—and discover the textures, complexities, and triumphs of womanhood through an ongoing survival of living in a racist, sexist culture. Just like her grandmother who was a quilter, Prince inherited the gift of sewing together words to show the struggles and survivals of family in the reverberations of history both public and personal while asking, How does one love in the aftermath?

author of Obsidian Blues and The Vernell Poems - Herman Beavers

Kin: Practically True Stories evinces the author's skill in balancing homage and improvisation to create a radically innovative reworking of Jean Toomer's 1923 masterpiece, Cane. But this is no mere act of unoriginal mimicry; rather Prince's volume successfully recasts Toomer's experimental modernism in order to find its way to a resonant lyricism that is at once evocative of times long past and of places containing bodies close enough to touch one minute and wholly emptied of presence the next. In the end, Prince accomplishes what Toomer's volume sought to achieve: to insist that at the intersection of memory and aspiration lies precarity.