Alison Hart

Watch Isabel Allende with Alison Hart at Book Passage in Corte Madera, discussing her novel Mostly White: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn69ndyr7uA&t=25s

Alison studied theater at New York University and later found her voice as a writer. She identifies as a mixed-race African American, Passamaquoddy Native American, Irish, Scottish, and English woman of color. Her play about a mixed-race young woman confronting her mother about their black heritage, Mother Daughter Dance, was produced by A Black Box Theater in San Francisco in 1995. Alison performed the part of the Mother. Her poetry collection Temp Words was published by Cosmo Press in 2015, and her poems appear in Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2016) and elsewhere. Most recently, she was introduced by Isabel Allende at Book Passage in Corte Madera, please view a video of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn69ndyr7uA&t=16s.

WORDS FROM THE AUTHOR:

I grew up not knowing my mother’s side of the family, that is the Black, Native American and Irish side from Maine. I knew my mother’s upbringing was difficult but she rarely spoke about it. My mom was a poet, scholar and humanitarian, her love for words and the arts inspired me. The characters in MOSTLY WHITE are loosely based on family history, some stories told to me, others, well, that’s the fun of writing fiction, I got to imagine them.

I needed to write this book, to understand my own roots, to pay honor to my mother’s story, to create characters that represented my experience and history as a mixed-race American woman, to heal, to forgive, to grieve and to celebrate.