Turn Where

“In Chet’la Sebree’s sensitive and tender hands, this book’s quest (and question) of home is captivating. An intimate rendering of the life of a Black woman artist, in these pages genealogy is a journey, the heart is a map, and family is essential even when uncertain… . Insightful, vulnerable, layered, and full of love.”—Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and author of Black in Blues

“An exquisitely observed and multifaceted collection of essays … This is the sort of book that invites the reader to share with loved ones, compare notes, and read again.”—Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters

“With a poet’s precision and care, Sebree has crafted an intricate map of one woman’s search for home… . A breathtaking essay collection that remains deeply rooted in history while forging ahead into the uncertain future.”—Lilly Dancyger, author of First Love

“Chet’la Sebree continues in the lineage of Dionne Brand, Katherine McKittrick, and Saidiya Hartman to trace and retrace home through language… . Turn (W)here charts new territory.”—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Magical/Realism

“A hearty feast for those of us at midlife starved for direction.”—Minda Honey, author of The Heartbreak Years

“An expansive topography of home through history, cultural criticism, and lived experience … Sebree writes beautifully about belonging and becoming, and how wanderlust is a crucial part of the equation.”—Michele Filgate, editor of What My Father and I Don’t Talk About

“Always trust a poet to deliver a beautiful memoir… . Chet’la Sebree’s essays about, broadly, searching for home as a Black woman in America, blend memoir, cultural criticism, and history and deliver a formally inventive, emotionally rich personal history that stretches beyond the bounds of the self.”—Literary Hub

“Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home is a superb, creatively structured, and often lyrical inquiry into the many facets of home… . Similar to Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed … Chet’la Sebree questions and confronts what it means to be a Black American and who shapes the lens of history… . Turn (W)here is a thoughtful, penetrating meditation on how one may or may not find their place in the world.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Turn (W)here is not a mere travelogue but a ‘travel song,’ a panoramic love letter to the poet’s own itinerant spirit… . In the words of Tina Campt, whom Sebree invokes, Turn (W)here ‘shifts the optics of ‘looking at’ to a politics of looking with, through, and alongside another.’”—Electric Literature

Chet’la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, Field Study (winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets), and Mistress (selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry).

Her essays and poems have been anthologized in:

• Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain)
• This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets (edited by Kwame Alexander)

Sebree is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.

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