Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown's life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history.

Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author's quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother's people from her life is at the heart of the narrative. The author struggles through life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father's brutal family. In this updated edition she adds a coda, 'finding mother', constructed from archives, genealogy, letters, and journals.

Initially published in 2010, this second edition includes expanded text and a foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember.

About the Author
Yvonne Shorter Brown is a public school teacher, author and historian in Toronto, Ontario.

Sonja Boon is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University. An award-winning researcher, writer, and teacher, Boon is the author of What the Oceans Remember (WLU Press, 2019) as well as three scholarly monographs, the most recent titled Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edge: Unsettled Islands (2018). For six years, she was principal flutist with the Portland Baroque Orchestra in Oregon.

Book Information
ISBN 9781771125475
Author Yvonne Shorter Brown
Format Paperback
Page Count 340
Imprint Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Weight(grams) 340g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 133mm * 13mm