Dreaming Me

Dreaming Me by Jan Willis.

A brilliant child growing up in the Jim Crow South, Jan Willis escaped the Ku Klux Klan only to face racism of another kind in an Ivy League university. Recruited by the Black Panther Party, she chose instead to travel to India and Nepal, where she encountered Lama Yeshe, a Tibetan monk who would become her mentor and later one of the most influential Buddhist teachers in the West. Through his guidance, Jan Willis learned to face down the demons of her past and embrace her whole identity-Black, Baptist, and Buddhist. Dreaming Me is her story, one that “will move anyone who is compelled by the examined life” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review).

Anne Sexton A Biography

Anne Sexton A Biography
Diane Wood Middlebrook
Biography
495 pages
copyright: 1992
isbn: 0-679-74182-8

Anne Sexton began writing poetry at the age of twenty-nine to keep from killing herself. She held on to language for dear life and somehow — in spite of alcoholism and the mental illness that ultimately led her to suicide — managed to create a body of work that won a Pulitzer Prize and that still sings to thousands of readers. This exemplary biography, which was nominated for the National Book Award, provoked controversy for its revelations of infidelity and incest and its use of tapes from Sexton’s psychiatric sessions. It reconciles the many Anne Sextons: the 1950s housewife; the abused child who became an abusive mother; the seductress; the suicide who carried “kill-me pills” in her handbag the way other women carry lipstick; and the poet who transmuted confession into lasting art.