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Black Heel Strings

Robin Michel Caudell
€29.99
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A01=Robin Michel Caudell
African American studies
ancestor
Author_Robin Michel Caudell
award winner
Category=DNC
Chesapeake
Choptank
Delmarva
Eastern shore
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Frederick Douglass
Free People of Color
haiku
Harriet Tubman
history
memoir
Native American and Indigenous studies
nature writing
segregation
slavery
veteran
veterans writing award

Product details

  • ISBN 9780815611981
  • Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 18 May 2026
  • Publisher: Syracuse University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Description

In this lyrical memoir, Robin Michel Caudell meditates on memory and identity as she traces her childhood in a Black family navigating poverty and racism on the Delmarva Peninsula. Many know Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman’s exodus stories out of bondage in rural Maryland, but what about the people who stayed? It is from this place and history that Caudell’s story begins. Growing up in the segregated 1960s, Caudell is the living legacy of the ones who did not run away and of the Free People of Color/Christianized Indians who partnered with their enslaved brethren in a precarious dance of love in Chesapeake Country.

The memoir’s title references a physical anomaly, believed to be indicative of Indigenous ancestry, which skips generations among Caudell’s Kellum kin. This trait is visible as a dark line that extends upward from the Achilles tendon, a visible link to her ancestry. An emotional odyssey, Black Heel Strings weaves Caudell’s adult and childhood memories into a vivid story that honors belonging, resilience, and recovery in her community and in this place.
About Robin Michel Caudell
An award-winning journalist and videographer, Robin Michel Caudell is a staff writer at the Press Republican. Her poetry has been anthologized in national and international publications. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Caudell is a graduate of the University of Maryland at College Park and Goddard College. She is an alumna of Cave Canem, Gotham Writers Workshop, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She served in the US Air Force and was a John L. Levitow Honor Graduate.

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