Morgan Jerkins is the New York Times bestselling memoirist behind the popular 2018 essay collection This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. Her anticipated follow-up, Wandering in Strange Lands, hit shelves August 4. Subtitled ‘A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots,’ Jerkins’ sophomore book is at once deeply personal and nationwide in its scope. Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as the Great Migration. In so doing, many became disconnected from their proud roots. As a means of rediscovering those national stories, Jerkins traced her own ancestors’ circuitous journey across the country – from Georgia and South Carolina, to Louisiana and Oklahoma, and all the way to California. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly lauded: “Jerkins’s careful research and revelatory conversations with historians, activists, and genealogists result in a disturbing yet ultimately empowering chronicle of the African-American experience.”

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