Dream Me Home Safely Writers on Growing Up in America [Paperback]

In the title essay of this extraordinary keepsake of childhood in America, John Edgar Wideman pays fierce tribute to a complex mother who used to dream me home safely by sitting up and waiting for me to stumble in. The young writer Bich Minh Nguyen remembers arriving in Michigan from Vietnam in 1975 and a classmate who said, Your house smells funny, and Michael Parker recalls a sister's vivid -- and hilarious -- act of defiance on a particular North Carolina evening in 1971. These and many more intensely intimate memories make Dream Me Home Safely a collection as diverse and powerful as all of American letters.

In the title essay of this extraordinary keepsake of childhood in America, John Edgar Wideman pays fierce tribute to a complex mother who used to dream me home safely by sitting up and waiting for me to stumble in. The young writer Bich Minh Nguyen remembers arriving in Michigan from Vietnam in 1975 and a classmate who said, Your house smells funny, and Michael Parker recalls a sister's vivid -- and hilarious -- act of defiance on a particular North Carolina evening in 1971. These and many more intensely intimate memories make Dream Me Home Safely a collection as diverse and powerful as all of American letters.

This collection constitutes a memorable portrait of coming-of-age in America. Booklist, ALA

FOREWORD

I am so grateful for this book celebrating the Children’s Defense Fund’s thirtieth anniversary. This gift of thirty-four extraordinary American writers sharing their stories of growing up in America paints a complex, richly detailed, and achingly real portrait of American childhood. Every reader will catch glimpses of his or her own childhood and see the childhoods of others with new eyes.
Tina McElroy Ansa remembers her nurturing black Georgia family and community as a world “made up of stories,” and listening at her mother’s side “as she whipped up batterl#-