Dawn Balmer Bücher

Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. These limitations become apparent when Dow considers how these mothers apply different parenting strategies for black boys and for black girls, and how they navigate different expectations about breadwinning and childrearing from the African American community. At the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, work, family, and culture, Mothering While Black sheds light on the exclusion of African American middle-class mothers from the dominant cultural experience of middle-class motherhood. In doing so, it reveals the painful truth of the decisions that black mothers must make to ensure the safety, well-being, and future prospects of their children.

Walk with this book to find some of the unexpected places where poetry can flourish. Discover poetry growing "where it can" in the infinite and in the microscopic, from the Milky Way to a snowflake's minute structures. Find it in a mountain pass or in the gritty sunlight of New York. Discover a poem embodied by the ferocious bulk of a "hunger-hearted" grizzly or in wilderness that is "lovely because it is empty." The poems in this anthology first appeared in The Amicus Journal, the quarterly publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Selected by the journal's poetry editor, Brian Swann, they represent a broad array of responses to the natural world -- from warning to celebration -- by some of our most distinguished poets, including Wendell Berry, Michael Dorris, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver, Pattiann Rogers, and William Stafford. All grapple with issues of nature and the environment from the perspective of the final decade of the millennium and remind us that we can be dazzled both by nature and by the poetry that explores the natural world