Jam on the Vine

In this "captivating saga" of the post-Reconstruction era, a black female journalist blazes her own trail--"unforgettable; gripping; an instant classic" (Elle).

Ivoe Williams, the precocious daughter of a Muslim cook and a metalsmith from central-east Texas, discovers a lifelong obsession with journalism when she steals a newspaper from her mother's white employer. Living in the segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in the printed word until she earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson Collegiate in Austin.

Finally fleeing the Jim Crow South to settle in Kansas City, Ivoe and Ona, her former teacher and present lover, start the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam On the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer--the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest--Ivoe risks her freedom and her life to call attention to the atrocities of the American prison system.

Inspired by the legacy of trailblazing black women like Ida B. Wells and Charlotta Bass, LaShonda Katrice Barnett's Jam On the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships that defined an era and "an ode to activism, writ[ten] with a scholar's eye and a poet's soul" (Tayari Jones, O The Oprah Magazine).

Author: Lashonda Katrice Barnett
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 02/09/2016
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780802124678

About the Author

LaShonda Katrice Barnett was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1974 and grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. She is the author of a story collection and editor of the volumes: I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007) and Off the Record: Conversations with African American & Brazilian Women Musicians (Rowman & Littlefield, Spring 2014). For short fiction, she received the College Language Association Award and the New York Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Artist Grant. Recent awards for writing and historical fiction research include the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities & National Endowment for the Humanities grant; Mystic Seaport's Munson Institute of Maritime Culture Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship; Sewanee Writers Conference Tennessee Williams Scholarship and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Advanced Fiction fellowship. A graduate of the University of Missouri, she received an M.A. in Women's History from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She has taught literature and history at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter College and Brown University.