Title: Ordinary light
Description: "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"--
Subjects: Poets, Death, Family, Race identity, Mothers, Mothers and daughters, African American women authors, Coming of age, Psychological aspects, Home, Identity (Psychology), African Americans, Biography, Psychology, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary, nyt:race-and-civil-rights=2015-06-07, New York Times bestseller, New York Times reviewed, African american women, African americans, biography, Women, united states, biography, African americans, race identity, Poets, biography
Places: United States
People: Tracy K. Smith