Sweetwater

Robin M. Boylorn is Associate Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at the University of Alabama. She is the co-editor of Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life and co-writer of The Crunk Feminist Collection. Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience received the 2013 It’s A Way of Life Narrative Ethnography Award, the 2013 Best Book Award by the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association, and the 2014 Outstanding Qualitative Book Award by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Her forthcoming book, Blackgirl Blue(s), introduces blackgirl (one word) autoethnography as a methodological intervention for women of color.

"The stories in "Sweetwater" are like oxygen after held breath-exhilarating, satisfying, and sustaining. Twiggy, Bread, and Bird love and scold, teach and hold each other, the women in their community, and the reader through their stories, lives, and worlds. Robin M. Boylorn is a writer who breathes air and life into her inheritance and shares the stories of her mothers with honesty, care, hope, and strength." -Stacy Holman Jones, Professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance, Monash University, and Co-editor of "The Handbook of Autoethnography" "Zora Neale Hurston is kicking dirt up out her grave! With Robin M. Boylorn's brave work, dust tracks become lineage and lines of text become clotheslines again. All that we are is hung out here to dry, wave surrender, or see morning. In content and form Dr. Boylorn's "Sweetwater" actualizes the black feminist imperative to lift up our stories, in this case the stories of rural black women, as catalysts towards a world better understood, more deeply held, and more transformatively loved." -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, Co-Creator of the Queer Black Mobile Homecoming Project, and Author of "Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity" "Robin M. Boylorn takes you intimately and viscerally into her life growing up and into the lives of the southern black rural women in her hometown. You hear women whispering and talking women-talk, see them worshipping and getting the spirit, smell the ham hocks cooking, sense the passion and pain of their daily romantic and family lives, feel their hearts beating and bleeding, share their resentment and love for the men who don't always do them right, and finally understand deeply the resilience it takes to get by no matter what challenges are thrown at you. Dr. Boylorn joins the creative genius of a Toni Morrison to the scholarship of black women's lives, exemplifying the ethnographic eye/I and ethical consciousness of the best of qualitative research. This is a stunning autoethnographic and narrative tour de force that will captivate students and scholars alike." -Carolyn Ellis, Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology, University of South Florida, and Author of "Revision: Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work"