Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, with a Foreword by Bryan Stevenson

WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE

"A compelling and important history that this nation desperately needs to hear." -Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative

Chasing Me to My Grave presents the late artist Winfred Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers, joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. There he learned the leather tooling skills that became the bedrock of his autobiographical paintings. Years later, encouraged by his wife, Patsy, Rembert brought his past to vibrant life in scenes of joy and terror, from the promise of southern Black commerce to the brutality of chain gang labor. Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American society.

Booklist #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year * African American Literary Book Club (AALBC) #1 Nonfiction Bestseller * Named a Best Book of the Year by: NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, ARTnews, and more * Amazon Editors' Pick * Carnegie Medal of Excellence Longlist

Author: Winfred Rembert, Erin I. Kelly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 09/12/2023
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.8lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.50w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781639731466

About the Author

Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia. His paintings on carved and tooled leather have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, and compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016, and is the subject of two award-winning documentary films, All Me and Ashes to Ashes. In the last decades of his life, he lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut. He was posthumously awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Chasing Me To My Grave. The Winfred Rembert Estate is co-represented by Fort Gansevoort and Hauser & Wirth.

Erin I. Kelly earned her PhD from Harvard and is the Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. She specializes in ethics and criminal law and is the author of The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2018). She was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Chasing Me to My Grave.
erinikelly.com