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A Novel
by Lakiesha Carr
A magisterial, intimate look at Black womanhood: the grief that is carried within the body and the bonds of love that grant strength.
Heat. Fire. Rain so blue. The blackness. The color of our hue.
A middle-aged woman feeds slots at a secret, back-room parlor. A new mother descends into a devastating postpartum depression, wracked with the fear that she is unable to protect her children. A daughter returns home to join the other women in her family waging spiritual combat with the ghosts of their past.
An Autobiography of Skin is a dazzling and masterful portrait of interconnected generations in the South from a singular new voice, offering a raw and tender view into the interior lives of Black women. It is at once a powerful look at how experiences are carried inside the body, inside the flesh and skin, and a joyous testament to how healing can be found within—in love, mercy, gratitude, and freedom.
"With gorgeous prose and subtly spectral vibes, Carr's striking debut delves into generational trauma...By tracing the characters' complex bonds, Carr underscores the power of community and kinship among Black women who find a way to be vulnerable and joyful in a world that too often changes them with the role of caretakers. This exploration of love, courage, and desire is not to be missed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[B]y turns eloquent and raw, fantastical and realistic...With vivid writing and characters, Carr's debut is sometimes brutal or sentimental, always passionate, never boring." - Kirkus Reviews
"Lakiesha Carr writes achingly...[A] distinguished debut—its bodily rhythms, its sensory evocativeness, its quality of attention to the human soul—perhaps what defines it most is its insistent drive toward honesty, toward the compelling truths that could only have been uncovered by the angled vision of this particular author." - Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man
"Full of aching desire and hard won wisdom, An Autobiography of Skin is a work of art. Carr's pages contain the kinds of Black women we see but seldom hear. This book is nothing short of a love letter to the powerful women who comprise the heart of a community." - Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You
"With rich and rhythmic prose, Lakiesha Carr pulls us into the warm, wounded bodies of her unforgettable characters. Obstinate, yearning women make their way through a world that day after day asks too much of them. Still, they each guard something miraculous: hope, mostly intact. Carr writes with compassion, wicked humor, and a rare intuition that runs deep and true." - Chia-Chia Lin, author of The Unpassing
This information about An Autobiography of Skin was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lakiesha Carr graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and received her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded a Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction and a Jeff and Vicki Edwards Post-graduate Fellowship in Fiction. A journalist and writer from East Texas, she has held various editorial and production positions with CNN, the New York Times, and other media. Her writing has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the DC Commission on Arts & Humanities for nonfiction writing, and the Kimbilio Fellowship for fiction writing.
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