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A powerful exploration of self-resilience, family, and community from activist and prison abolitionist Keeonna Harris.
Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was "grown." Within a year she was pregnant and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a "mainline mama," a parent facing the task of raising a child—while still growing up herself—with an incarcerated partner.
In this triumphant memoir, Keeonna recalls her challenging journey as a mainline mama, from learning to overcome the exhausting difficulties of navigating the carceral system in the United States to transforming herself into an advocate for women like her—the predominantly Black and Brown women left behind to pick up the pieces of their families and fractured lives.
Keeonna speaks frankly about the forces that threatened to defeat her, how she learned to rebuild her broken relationship with a mother who had lost trust in her, and how time eased the shame, guilt, and stigma of being a young Black teen mom with a partner behind bars. She offers inspiration and solace, showing how to create moments of beauty, humanity, and love—such as picking the perfect wedding dress for a ceremony in a state prison visiting room—in a place designed to break spirits.
Mainline Mama is about creating self-love and community—crucial acts of radical resistance against a prison industrial complex designed to dehumanize and to separate and shut away incarcerated individuals and their loved ones from the world.
"This affecting dispatch from inside the carceral state is not to be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Unflinching in its indictment of prisons, this book is also a celebration of female resilience and courage in the face of a penal system meant to break—rather than reform—the lives of incarcerated people and their families. An engrossing memoir about resisting carceral dehumanization through community, connection, and self-love." —Kirkus Reviews
"A story of resilience, family, and humanity in the face of oppression, Mainline Mama is a unique look at the far-reaching impacts of the prison system in America...Teens will relate to Harris' story of coming of age as a young Black woman in L.A." —Booklist
"Mainline Mama is the rare book written to shake a system off its bloody hinges and as importantly, the writing here makes a home of the faithful space between head and heart, between yearning and wishing. Just an absolutely awesome and vigorous work of art. Keeonna Harris is a writer's writer, do you hear me." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
"This is a tender, smart and thoughtful book. Its pages are filled with beauty and disappointment and the hard won victories of a force of nature who grew up in the shadow of the prison." —Reuben Jonathan Miller, MacArthur fellow and author of Halfway Home
This information about Mainline Mama 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.
Keeonna Harris is a writer, storyteller, mother of five, prison abolitionist, activist, and academic, born and raised in Watts and other parts of South Central Los Angeles. Her work focuses on health disparities and radical organizing for women connected to systems of mass incarceration, mothering, and community building as acts of radical defiance against carceral institutions. Harris has received several honors, including a 2018–2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, a 2021 Tin House Summer Residency, a 2023 Baldwin For The Arts Residency, and a 2023 Hedgebrook Fellowship as the 2023 Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence. She is a 2024 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health. She is developing the Borderland Project, a mental health and community support system for women forced to navigate carceral institutions to maintain connections with incarcerated persons. She lives in Seattle.
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