Joan Steinau Lester

Committed to the struggle for civil rights, in the late 1950s Joan Steinau marched and protested as a white ally and young woman coming to terms with her own racism. She fell in love and married a fellow activist, the Black writer Julius Lester, establishing a partnership that was long and multifaceted but not free of the politics of race and gender. As the women's movement dawned, feminism helped Lester find her voice, her pansexuality, and the courage to be herself. Braiding intellectual, personal, and political history, Lester tells the story of a writer and activist fighting for love and justice before, during, and after the Supreme Court's 1967 decision striking down bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. She describes her own shifts in consciousness, from an activist climbing police barricades by day and reading and writing late into the night to a woman navigating the coming-out process in midlife, before finding the publishing success she had dreamed of. Speaking candidly about every facet of her life, Lester illuminates her journey to fulfillment and healing.

Identity Crisis. As a biracial teen, Nina is accustomed to a life of varied hues—mocha-colored skin, ringed brown hair streaked with red, a black father, a white mother. When her parents decide to divorce, the rainbow of Nina’s existence is reduced to a much starker reality. Shifting definitions and relationships are playing out all around her, and new boxes and lines seem to be drawn every day. Between the fractures within her family and the racial tensions splintering her hometown, Nina feels caught in perpetual battle. Stranded in a nowhere land of ethnic boundaries, and struggling for personal independence and identity, Nina turns to the story of her great-great-grandmother’s escape from slavery in hopes of finding her own compass to help navigate the challenges before her." Lester conjures a credible plot and complications; divorce is a fact of life and racially mixed heritage is conspicuously becoming one. The simple contrapuntal narrative of Sarah Armstrong's escaping slavery distinguishes the book emotionally and psychologically, raising it above other issue-oriented Young Adult novels. Lester writes with social sensitivity and an ear for teen language and concerns. This is engaging treatment of a challenging subject that comes with little precedent." * -- Starred Publishers Weekly Review"The tenderness and truth of your book moved my heart. As well as the enormous love you have." -- Alice Walker "Teens will be caught by the alternating stories, and yes, by the messages about...prejudice, then and now, which will make for great group discussion." -- Booklist

This refreshing handbook—equally useful in the boardroom, the classroom, and the living room—captures insightful lessons from personal encounters with diversity. Award-winning author Dr. Joan Lester is a talented storyteller. Her generous voice sheds keen insight, humor and practical advise on the polarizing dilemmas of living with diversity.

Mama’s Child is story of an idealistic young white woman who travelled to the American South as a civil rights worker, fell in love with an African American man, and started a family in San Francisco, where the more liberal city embraced them—except when it didn’t. They raise a son and daughter, but the tensions surrounding them have a negative impact on their marriage, and they divorce when their children are still young. For their biracial daughter, this split further destabilizes her already challenged sense of self—“Am I black or white?” she must ask herself, “Where do I belong?” Is she her father’s daughter alone? As the years pass, the chasm between them widens, even as the mother attempts to hold on to the emotional chord that binds them. It isn’t until the daughter, Ruby, herself becomes a wife and mother that she begins to develop compassion and understanding for the many ways that her own mother’s love transcended race and questions of identity.

Impassioned civil rights activist, champion of women's rights, hard-driving legislator -- U. S. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton is known in Washington as the "Warrior on the Hill." Fire in My Soul is the story of Norton's extraordinary political career, told from a personal perspective. Author Joan Steinau Lester met Norton in 1958 while they were both students at Antioch College. Fire in My Soul charts their longstanding friendship and tells of Norton's rise to leadership -- from her early on-campus activism to demanding a Senate hearing for Anita Hill to standing before the Supreme Court to uphold first amendment rights. Filled with scores of Lester's conversations and correspondence with Norton, interviews with Norton's colleagues and confidantes, and dozens of original photographs, Fire in My Soul is a compelling biography of one of the greatest political pioneers in American history.