Submerged: Tales from the Basin is an anthology of literature, memoir, and art created by more than thirty women to benefit those who survived Hurricane Katrina. The title refers to a fear many of us had as young children, of having our heads submerged under water while our mothers washed our hair. The stories, essays, poems, and art of Submerged are an exploration of each contributor's relationship with her hair, in most cases emotional, often humorous, and consistently generated from youth. An African American writer discusses having her hair ironed straight in the 1960s, with her mother trying hard to keep her from looking like a Black Panther. A Southern writer laments her childhood braid lying in a box in perpetual youth while she, herself, ages. A young woman watches her aging grandmother go bald. A lonely widow rediscovers intimacy from the remote touch of her wax technician. A New Orleans performance group talks about Hurricane Katrina, gender stereotypes, and hair as stage craft. Artist Lorien Jordan has created a series of drawings in response to these essays, memoirs, and poems. A percentage of the book's proceeds will help support charities based in New Orleans that work with ongoing relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Lauren González grew up in Illinois and has since lived in California and New York. She received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2006, and was a Hispanic Scholarship Foundation/McNamara Family Creative Arts Project fellow that year. Thanks to this foundation’s generosity, she completed a book of profiles called Animal People. Her narrative profile of workers on New York’s Old Fulton Fish Market was published in The Reading Room literary magazine in June 2006. She has finished her first novel, The Junkyard, and is currently working on her second, They Met During a War. She is a member of the SoHo Writer’s Room on Broadway in New York City. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Lorien Jordan is a visual artist whose work stems from isolating transient moments in time to reveal the beauty and sadness found in the impermanence of life. Lorien grew up in South Carolina and pursued her BA in painting at Arizona State University. She completed her MA in studio art with a concentration in printmaking at New York University in 2005. In 2007, she completed a one-year residency at the Amsterdam Grafisch Atelier in the Netherlands. Her many exhibitions include work at Young Blood Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia; Gitana Rosa Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, MPG Contemporary in Boston, Massachusetts; and the International Print Center New York. Lorien lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Find work from her projects Negotiable Affection and Strangely Shaped Novels online at www.mypaperanchor.com.

Contributors: Gretl Claggett, Sumayya Coleman, Dianne D. Feula, Stella Fiore, Anne L. Francis, Kelly A. Gola, Lauren González, Leslie González, Mary Ann González, Lauren Guida, Ellen Hagan, Shayla Hason, Anne Hays, Rebecca O. Johnson, Lorien Jordan, Jean Kahler, Cynthia Blair Kane, Hope Kavoosi, Shannon Kelley, Dafna Kory, Emily Macel, Jessica Palmer, Lissette Peña, Sara V. Pic, Carla Porch, Bonnie Richardson, Alyssa Robbins, Skye Van Saun, Bren Simmers, Miriam Weisfeld, Anne K. Wenzel, Kara Westerman, Allison Yates

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Submerged: Tales from the Basin is now available to pre-order for its release on September 1, 2008.
Online orders ship out on September 2.
Find it at our online store.
US $19.95
ISBN 978-0-9802300-2-4/LCCN 2008932593