Have You Read?
Truth, a novel based on the life of Sojourner Truth
“Truth rings as true as the original words of the incomparable Sojourner Truth on which this novel is based. It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck!”
Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom
Born a slave, survived a free bondswoman, reborn an outspoken abolitionist, Sojourner Truth died a heroine of graceful proportions. But the story of her inner struggles is as powerful and provocative as her accomplishments and could only be captured in fiction. This emotionally searing novel beautifully infuses the historical atrocities of the 1800s with the psychological speculation of who Sojourner Truth really was, beyond her social and political persona.
In a feat of literary ventriloquism, Sheehan puts the story back in Sojourner’s voice, lending the telling a naked, crystalline quality that transport the reader to a time when survival could mean sacrificing little pieces of one’s soul.
Women Writing in Prison, an anthology
Edited by Jacqueline Sheehan
“If courage is grace under pressure, then these poems are graceful expressions under the real pressures of confinement. Poetry’s acclaimed power to liberate is vividly exemplified in Women Writing in Prison; each poem is at once a private act of escape and confrontation.”
Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate
After working with women in prison teaching writing workshops, Sheehan edited an anthology of their work. The project is run by Voices From Inside, a group designed to bring creative writing to incarcerated women and to bring their voices to the outside world to increase awareness about the human cost of incarceration.
What do women in prison write about? They write about food, home, family, planting gardens, the men who have beat them, the smell of grandmother’s hair. They make funny rhymes, laugh at old boyfriends, long to pee in a bathroom with a door, and breathe fresh air. They write with honesty and freshness that is only lightly edited to maintain their unique voices. Part of the bondage that many incarcerated women face is drug addiction, and they write about this with searing frankness. The purchase of this anthology funds continuing writing programs for women in prison.