Mercy Romero is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Sonoma State University.

“Mercy Romero’s Toward Camden is a profoundly moving and necessary meditation on Camden, a city marked by abandonment, dispossession, and resistance. In weaving familial narratives with the lives and deaths in and of Camden, Romero opens possibilities for us to consider the cultural geographies of a city and a people attending to survival. A tender, haunting, and critical work, Toward Camden has implications for our considerations of home, capitalism, gentrification, loss, and love.” - Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, author of (Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature) “I've been waiting for Mercy Romero's book all of my life. Camden is home to my family, but there have been too few writers who have turned to it as a city worthy of deep and loving observation. Toward Camden is a response to that erasure. And it won't be soon forgotten.” - Darnell L. Moore, author of (No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America) "Romero . . .  combines incisive political commentary, cultural criticism, and memoir in her vibrant debut, a collection of essays about her hometown of Camden, N.J. . . . Elegiac yet hopeful, this meditation is full of power." (Publishers Weekly) "Romero joins a rare breed of writers who manage to convert hardship to healing, and isolation to more universal truths. Readers who chose to move toward Camden with Romero will be rewarded, not with a full explanation for what they encounter, but with an appreciation for how the human resilience she recounts and displays can be an inspiration for us all." - Howard Gillette Jr. (New Jersey Studies)

• Acknowledgments  viiPrologue 11. Toward Camden 12. Empty Lots  303. Demolition Futures  474. Halfway Houses  68Epilogue  93Notes  97Bibliography  111Index  121