Pub Date: Oct. 15th, 2019
Format: Paperback
Pages: 55
Trim Size: 4.5″ x 6.25″
ISBN: 978–0–983547–87–7
Price: $9

Carolyn Holbrook’s Earth Angels discovers, in the intimate spaces of daily life, contact points with visionary experience. As a mother, artist, daughter, sister, teacher, and an African-American elder, Holbrook’s non-fiction unites worlds seen and unseen, domestic, intellectual, and supernatural, and weaves each narrative moment to its roots. Earth Angels shows us that whenever two people meet they have a spiritual encounter in a historical context, and that this moment is both fraught and rich, reverberating through families and time. We need Carolyn Holbrook to remind us of this richness, and to demonstrate the complexity of its gifts. Earth Angels is revelatory to the way mundane moments of an individual life act as a nexus for history and for the spirit world, the family, institutions and the imagination.

Visits from loved ones who have passed on were not new to me. Just the year before, my sister called on me to help her decide whether to stay or to cross over after she suffered a brain aneurism. Though she was in San Francisco and I in Minneapolis, I reached through the veil and held her hand, and knew the moment the aneurism took her life.

Carolyn Holbrook leads More Than a Single Story, a series of panel discussions and community conversations for people of color and indigenous writers and arts activists. She is author of Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify: Essays (University of Minnesota Press) Ordinary People, Extraordinary Journeys and Earth Angels, and coauthor with Arleta Little of Minnesota civil rights icon Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s memoir, Hope In the Struggle (Minnesota, 2019). Her personal essays have been published in A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (MNHS Press). She is recipient of the Hamline University Exemplary Teacher Award, the Minnesota Book Award’s Kay Sexton Award, a Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step grant, a Minnesota State Arts Board Cultural Community Partnership grant, a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant, and was an AARP/Pollen Midwest 50 over 50 honoree. She teaches at Hamline University and in community venues. She is the mother of five, grandmother of eight, and great-grandmother of one.

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