“Tony?”
“Sara, how you doing?”
A complex question. I was sitting in a nice
house with no job, two kids, and I’d just received the bad news that my former
husband was also unemployed so there would be no more health insurance or child
support coming. I’d just sat my stunned self on the sofa when the phone rang.
Tony Moore was a partner at the second largest law firm in the world, one of two African American lawyers working there at the time, and he didn’t want to hear all that, so I said, “Fine.”
“We (Jones Day) have been doing some pro bono
for CMHA (housing authority) and their new director Claire Freeman needs some
PR help. Would you be available?”
It was 1991, I had just started visiting
schools with my new self-published poetry books and this was the phone call
that would change my life. You don’t
have to be schizophrenic to work all day in the hood and in impoverished
schools and come home at night to your hot tub, but it certainly helps. I
started hearing voices, lots of them.
From the Park Bench is a book of poems in
multiple voices that has been 25 years in the writing. I don’t have much
explanation for myself about that, just that over the years, through conversations
with kids, teachers, CMHA residents and co-workers – I took a lot of
notes.
There is never one side to any story, and
what I have learned is there are rarely only two sides to a story.
This afternoon I will be signing and
introducing From the Park Bench, published by Red Giant Press from 4-6PM at Guide
to Kulcher Bookstore, 5900 Detroit, Cleveland, OH. Joining me will be Michael Salinger who
will be signing the paperback release of his book for teens, Well Defined,
Vocabulary in Rhyme (also Red Giant).
