Back Home to Historical Fiction by Irene Latham

 My first middle grade book to hit the marketplace was Leaving Gee's Bend (Penguin, 2010), set in 1932 Gee's Bend, Alabama. Since then I've written picture books, poetry, nonfiction, contemporary fiction, dystopian fiction, and whatever captures my imagination—including an historical fiction picture book Meet Miss Fancy (Penguin, 2019), set in Jim Crow 1913 Birmingham, Alabama. But my next book African Town, co-written with Charles Waters, brings me back to long-form history.

African Town is the story of the last slave ship Clotilda and the 110 Africans who arrived on Alabama shores in 1860 as enslaved people and eventually created a community called African Town, which exists to this day (and is now known as Africatown).

Our book is a verse novel told in 14 voices and spans roughly forty years (ending in 1901), so the characters move from being kidnapped as teens in West Africa (now Benin) to being parents/grandparents in Alabama.

It's one of those stories that rearranges your heart, and Charles and I are beyond excited to join with the descendants of Clotilda survivors to serve as ambassadors for this important and inspiring history. We were fortunate to be able to conduct on-site research in February 2020, just before the country shut down in response to the pandemic—and it looks like we'll be able to return to Africatown to celebrate the book's release in January 2022. Hooray!

Preorder African Town

Read about Clotilda in National Geographic magazine

Learn more in our interview with Betsy Bird at Fuse #8.

Thank you so much for reading! Happy November.

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Irene Latham is a grateful creator of many novels, poetry collections, and picture books, including the coauthored Can I Touch Your Hair?: Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship, which earned a Charlotte Huck Honor, and The Cat Man of Aleppo, which won a Caldecott Honor. Irene lives on a lake in rural Alabama.