Boondock Kollage

Regina N. Bradley is Assistant Professor of African American Literature at Armstrong State University and an alumna Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at Harvard University. She can be reached at www.redclayscholar.com.

"Regina Bradley is a gifted writer who makes contemporary southern black life visible and viable. She writes us as our beautiful, black, redeemable selves. Boondock Kollage is a masterful collection of twelve short stories that introduces Bradley as an up-and-coming storyteller who's been hearing and telling stories all of her life. This is her heart project, and she gives us her heart. The intimacy and familiarity from which she writes southern black life not only humanizes us, it loves (on) us. Her carefully crafted prose gives a glimpse of black folk and black life in the post–Civil Rights black South, offering a mirror so we can see ourselves and our memories in line after line, page after page, story after story. You will carry her stories, her characters, and her characterizations with you. They feel like home. They feel like us. They feel like ours."Robin M. Boylorn, Associate Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication, The University of Alabama; author of Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience

• Kiese Laymon: Foreword – Prologue: Reckoning – Acknowledgments – Part One: Reaching Back Around – A Visitation from Grace – Intentions – Between the Hedges – Good Bleach – Part Two: Long Division – Beautiful Ones – Happy Feelins – Splish-Splash – Skin Carnival – As Above So Below – Part Three: Stitches in Time – The Apothecary – Moving Furniture – Some Kind of Wonderful (Illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) – Discussion Question Bank.