Francisco

Includes a new foreward by Saidya Hartman

Alison Mills Newman's innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A "fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English," as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well as her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing-- Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, "the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth ... the gift of art for the survival of the human heart."

Alison Mills Newman started her career as the first African American teenage actress on a television series ( Julia). As a musician and vocalist she has performed with Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Weather Report, and Taj Mahal. She is an award-winning film director and the author of the novel Maggie 3. Mills Newman is the president of Keep the Faith Film Ministries, a chaplain at Fulton County Jail, and has five beautiful children with the late Francisco Toscono Newman, as well as ten grandchildren.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, she is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and lives in New York.

• Publisher: New Directions (March 7, 2023)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 128 pages
• ISBN-10: 0811232395
• ISBN-13: 9780811232395
• Item Weight: 5.3 ounces
• Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8.1 inches