Sweetwater—Black Women and Narratives of Resilience

This book has won the 2014 Qualitative Book Award

Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural South. This book captures the artistry, strength, hope, sound, language, and creativity shared by first-hand accounts of black women in a familial village community in North Carolina. Sweetwater is about the black female experience as it relates to friendship, family, spirituality, poverty, education, addiction, mental illness, romantic relationships, raising children, and everyday survival. Written from field notes and memory, the author combines narrative and autoethnography to weave her own experiences as a rural black girl into the story, revealing the complexities of black women’s lived experiences and exposing the communicative and interpersonal choices black women make through storytelling. Narrative inquiry and black feminism are offered as creative educational tools for discussing how and why black women’s singular interior lives are culturally and globally significant.

Robin M. Boylorn is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at The University of Alabama, where she teaches and writes about the intersections of race, gender/sex, class, and sexuality. Her primary research interests focus on the lived and storied experiences of black women, social identity, diversity, and critical auto/ethnography. In addition to academic publications she also writes feminist and cultural critiques as a member of the Crunk Feminist Collective.