Celebrate with me!! It’s official on November 12, 2019

November 11-15 – Goodreads Guest Author - American Historical Fiction Group
November 15 – Book Event, Princeton Retirees Group (Private home)
November 16 – Local Author Day – Barnes and Noble Menlo Park Mall, 4-6 pm November 20 - Private Event, Women's Club, Clark, NJ
November 22 – Book Talk, Ricochet Health Club South Plainfield 7 PM 
December 1 – Book Launch!! In Conversation with Michelle Cameron 
The Writers Circle - 426 Springfield Ave. Summit, NJ  2-4 PM

“Debut novelist Sanchez has crafted a moving and timely story, based on her own experiences, about school integration in the South in 1969 and the issues that still linger today. This powerful tale offers a beacon of hope that individuals can inspire change.”
 –Library Journal Premium Review
 
School desegregation is something we all learn about in history class; perhaps we even remember the striking image of Ruby Bridges being escorted to and from school by the U.S. Marshals. But for most of us in 2019, that’s near the extent of what we understand about that tumultuous time. Eileen Sanchez, the debut novelist behind Freedom Lessons (She Writes Press, November 12, 2019), draws on her own remarkable experience as a young, white teacher in the Jim Crow South during desegregation, to write her immersive work of fiction inspired by those events. The result is an unusually authentic exploration of a snapshot in history through the eyes of characters that are relatable and unmistakably human—living lives and navigating relationships against the backdrop of extreme societal upheaval. Sanchez has woven a beautiful story not just about desegregation as an abstract concept, but about the people who lived it—and asks us to question our assumptions about that time, and the issues it has left in its 50-year wake. 

Freedom Lessons begins in Louisiana 1969 as Colleen, a white northern teacher, enters into the unfamiliar culture of a small Southern town and its unwritten rules as the town surrenders to mandated school integration. She meets Frank, a black high school football player, who is protecting his family with a secret. And Evelyn, an experienced teacher and prominent member of the local black community, who must decide whether she’s willing to place trust in her new white colleague. Told alternately by Colleen, Frank, and Evelyn, Freedom Lessons is the story of how the lives of these three purportedly different people intersect in a time when our nation faced, as it does today, a crisis of race, unity, and identity.