Books by Minrose Gwin

A daughter's brave and beautiful tribute to a remarkable damaged soul . . . For novelist Minrose Gwin, growing up was a time of chaos and uncertainty, the result of? being raised by a parent with a serious mental illness. Life with poet Erin Taylor was unpredictable at best and painful at the worst times, as she spiraled ever deeper into psychosis until her eventual death from cancer. But reading her mother's childhood diary as an adult, Minrose encountered a very different Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner. Her late mother's words, written in the 1930s, revealed a cheerful, perceptive young girl growing up in rural Mississippi who wished for snow that "usually didn't come"?a girl with a bright view of the future as she progressed from college student to young mother to published poet, only to have an unbearable darkness close in around her, cruelly suffocating her hopes and dreams.In her poignant and extraordinary memoir Wishing for Snow, Minrose Gwin sets out to rediscover her mother in the poems, letters, newspaper clippings, and quixotic lists that Erin left behind after her death. The result is an unforgettable true story of a Southern family and the tragic figure at its center?and a loving daughter's determination to find the mother she never knew.

As the first NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, Medgar Wiley Evers put his life on the line to investigate racial crimes and to organise boycotts and voter registration drives. In this compelling study of collective memory and artistic production, Minrose Gwin engages the powerful body of work that has emerged in response to Evers's life and death - fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and songs.