Our guest on @Sree's Sunday #NYTReadalong this week is Kristal Brent Zook. She is the author of The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a coming-of-age tale about what it means to be biracial in America. Neil Parekh will serve as guest host. Kristal grapples with in-betweenness, childhood sexual assault, economic insecurity, and multiple generations of alcoholism and substance abuse on both the black and white sides of her family. Her story is one of strong black women—herself, her cousin, her mother, and her grandmother—and the generational cycles of oppression and survival that seemingly define their lives.
She tells the story of a little girl who never gives up on love, even long after it seems to have been destroyed. In the end she triumphs, reconciling with her father and strengthening the bond with her mother to create the family of her dreams, which she does through forgiveness and sheer force of will. A testament to the power of settling into one’s own authentic identify, this book tells a story of a daughter’s lifelong yearning, a mother’s rediscovery of lost love, and the profound power of atonement and faith to heal a broken family.
Kristal Brent Zook is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University and the author of three previous books: Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television, Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Pain and Power, and I See Black People: The Rise and Fall of African American-Owned Television and Radio. Zook’s entertainment, cultural, and social justice journalism has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, Essence, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is based in Miami and New York.
More on Kristal
On Kristal's Medium page, readers can get exclusive excerpts from the book and new articles and essays that aren’t published anywhere else.
On Saturday, August 12 from 10-10:30 a.m
. ET, Kristal will be speaking on the topic of multiracial identity at a FREE digital conference hosted by Medium: “Invisible Identities: How multiracial experience is changing our sense of identity and belonging.” Click here to register.
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