Published in 2025
261 pages
7 hours and 25 minutes
Alexis Okeowo has reported on conflict, human rights, and culture across Africa, Mexico, Europe, and the American South for the New Yorker and other publications. Okeowo is the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Her work has also been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Travel Writing. Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 2020 and received the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2022.
What is this book about?
From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.
“In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….”
Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the Confederacy—as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with Alabama’s, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.
In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians’ lives, and the state’s lesser-known histories to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.
