Kristie Robin Johnson

Among the personal essayist’s great challenges—the fundamental challenge—is to somehow be ruthlessly unsentimental about life’s traumas and tribulations while still projecting warmth, good humor, empathy, and generosity of spirit: to cast a cold eye on life without being, or seeming to be, cold. In the twenty-one essays (many as piquant as they are brief) that make up High Cotton, Kristie Robin Johnson more than meets this goal. But given the vicissitudes that have informed her life and that are her book’s principal subject, Johnson’s greatest feat is having written the thing at all. That it happens to be so well-written is, one might say, the icing on the cake.

High Cotton is a compelling collection of essays that reveal a wide-ranging, pointed curiosity that aims for excavation and revelation. In direct and lively prose, Johnson examines how race, gender, motherhood, sexual violence, poverty, and disability shape her dreams and desires, her realities and responsibilities. Johnson is an uncompromising truthteller, at once vulnerable and fierce, soft and hard. Johnson’s essays recount stories of pain forgiven but not forgotten, of love lost but also of love found again and again.

``The pure quality of Kristie Robin Johnson's timely, riveting High Cotton often left me breathless. Johnson's dextrous prose makes this vivid collection soar even when taking on the weightiest of themes. I left this book feeling as if my heart and mind had both expanded. How can life be so hard and so beautiful all at once? I don't know, but I'm sure the answer lies in these pages.``

``I wish that every new essay collection that I read struck me with this kind of honesty, conviction, daring, and intelligence. Kristie Robin Johnson’s High Cotton adds new experiences and insights to the canon of literary creative nonfiction. Her writing conveys the personal, cultural, and professional with poignant sensitivity. Familial addiction, predatory dating, skin tone, matriarchal lines, reading Audre Lorde, school lock downs—this is important, fresh work, and you’ll want to read it through from cover to cover.``

``Both alluringly personal and culturally astute, High Cotton examines race, gender and poverty through the author's experiences as a black daughter, a black mother and, chiefly, a black woman living in the Deep South. This is a book about finding your place, knowing your place, and the ways you can and cannot escape that place. Kristie Robin Johnson's voice is both lyrical and sharp, soft as cotton, stinging as a snakebite. These essays have charm and power and enviable strength.``