Research Catalog

Title

Ordinary light : a memoir / Tracy K. Smith.

Author

Smith, Tracy K.

Publication

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

349 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• "A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"--
• "From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel, to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions--between her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and 'ecstatic possibility,' and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God's plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet's precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home"--

Subject

• Smith, Tracy K
• Smith, Tracy K. > Family
• African American women authors > Biography
• Mothers > United States > Death
• Mothers and daughters > United States
• Coming of age > United States
• Home > Psychological aspects
• African Americans > Race identity
• Identity (Psychology) > United States
• Poets > Psychology
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
• BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary

Genre/Form

Autobiographies.

Note

• "This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.

Contents

Prologue: The Miracle -- I. My Book House -- Wild Kingdom -- Spirits and Demons -- Kin -- Leroy -- A Home in the World -- II. MGM -- Little Feats of Daring -- Total Adventure -- Book a Big Band -- A Necessary Rite -- Humor -- III. Uninvisible -- The Night Stalker -- Hot & Fast -- Shame -- Mother -- Epistolary -- Positive -- IV. Kathleen -- Something Better -- The Woman at the Well -- A Strange Thing to Do -- I, Too -- Testimony -- V. Another Dialect of the Soul -- Something Powerful at Her Side -- A Strange After -- Abide -- Clearances -- Epilogue: Dear God.

Call Number

JFD 16-728

ISBN

• 9780307962669 (cloth)
• 0307962660 (cloth)
• 9780307962676 (ebook) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2014026185

OCLC

900157951

Author

Smith, Tracy K., author.

Title

Ordinary light : a memoir / Tracy K. Smith.

Publisher

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Edition

First edition.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Connect to:

Cover image

Research Call Number

JFD 16-728

Sc D 15-807