“Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes us out of our comfort zone and into the sea, where other species are moving and mothering in ways that can teach us how to survive. This wild prose poem is about an Other that turns out to be ourselves." Her tales of sea life entwined with meditations on Black feminism become modern fables that offer new methods of feeling, and insist with the best of environmental literature that protecting the planet’s collapsing animal ecologies is vital to saving what makes us human. Its intellectual risk centers on the premise that love can be our most radical and transformative act. "In Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs has written a singular hybrid of hymn, field guide, and self-care manual that urges us to reassess our place among our fellow living beings. Gumbs’s narrative moves seamlessly between dolphins born in captivity and Black political prisoners giving birth behind bars, between the migratory patterns of dolphins and the Atlantic slave trade. Part of the "Emergent Strategy" series, the book is divided into eighty short meditations, each grouped into “movements” with names like “Listen,” “Breath,” “Stay Black,” and “Go Deep.” A graceful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice, it explores themes that range from the ways that echolocation might inform our understandings of visionary action to the similar ways that humans and marine mammals do-or might-adapt within our increasingly dire circumstances. The result is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that produces not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wonder and questioning. Employing a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation, and Black feminist insights, she translates their submerged wisdom to reveal what they might teach us. She has found them to be queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans have imposed on the ocean. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Undrowned is part of the Emergent Strategy Series. Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.2022 Whiting Foundation Winner in Nonfiction. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail-just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor-including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother-and how she retook control of her life.
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