JOURNALS OF JO

I've spent my entire life trying to be better than where I came from. Where I'm from, the girls there, don't usually make it out of the...

If I could rip my own heart from my chest and show everyone the blood that courses through it.  Point out where the veins meet the artery,

I miss that you weren’t there for my first day of kindergarten. The first time I scraped my knee. The first time I wore my first party dres

You don’t know me Because you’re not ready for me. I’m sage advice. I’m a life lived. I’m the light in the tunnel. I’m the friend when you

But that very moment when you accept for a certainty that the loss, that it's real and permanent, your life changes. Sometimes it’s subt

But the real work hadn't started. In the weeks, months and years that followed the work we thought would be done, had still gone undone.

There were days when you could hear my momma yelling at the top her voice so that any one of her fourteen children would answer her and do w

You looked at us as we marched and yelled in righteous indignation, crying out for justice. Begging to be seen and heard by deaf ears. There

When the time came and I did get solitude and quiet, I was filled with fear and anxiety and I couldn’t wait to be in that crowd of people ca

I was pushed head first, into the trenches, before I was old enough to even realize what a fight was. I was pitted against myself into a bat