Fear Not the Fall: Poems and a Two-Act Drama

In three dozen poems and a two-act play, MacArthur Fellow Billie Jean Young honors the tradition of struggle, resistance, and survival common to generations of women descended from African slaves. The tradition she dramatizes in her acclaimed portrayal of Fannie Lou Hamer (here for the first time in book form)—the tradition of making a way out of no way—is the same tradition she celebrates in remembering her mother’s “rub-board hands.” Her poetry also reveals the often hidden costs of resis...