Meet the Author: Dionne Ford, Author of "Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing."
The Springfield Free Public Library is delighted to host an evening with Dionne Ford, the author of "Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance and Intergenerational Healing," at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, September 20.
After finding a century old family photograph, Ford went on a search that illuminated slavery's legacy of sexual violence, and the photograph became a physical key to unlocking an emotional inheritance that redefines the very nature of American family. The odyssey brings Ford to long-lost cousins both Black and white, the oil rich Gulf of Mississippi where one black ancestor was lynched and another went from being property to owning it, to forgotten newspaper articles about her great grandmother’s family lost to slavery, to an eBay sword that belonged to the Colonel—a Louisiana cotton broker woven in Ford’s lineage—which she considers using as a way into the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Combining the story of her inner life with research and reflections on how racial trauma is generated, repeated, stored, and processed, the book reveals what the cycle looks like and how it might be broken. This is a memoir about how, in the search for belonging, family can be a source of loneliness, danger, but also a true home.
GO BACK AND GET IT is an intimate and candid look into one woman’s reckoning with the complexity of family and societal legacy. At its core, this is a deeply personal and ultimately joyful story rooted in hope and healing that allows Ford to reclaim her enslaved grandmothers’ stories, redefine family on her own terms, and take back her own body.
Dionne Ford is an NEA creative writing fellow and the co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, New Jersey Monthly, the Rumpus, and Ebony and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen's Club of New York. She holds a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from New York University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters.
This program is free and open to all members of the general public, and registration is not required. For more information, contact Dale Spindel, Library Director, at