Jam on the Vine: A Novel

Jam on the Vine is a powerful and moving story of one woman's struggle for equality in the face of segregation and discrimination.

Ivoe Williams, a precocious young woman from central-east Texas, immerses herself in printed matter as an escape from her dour surroundings and earns a scholarship to a prestigious college in Austin.

However, she returns overqualified to the menial labor offered by her hometown's racially biased employers and eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family, settling in Kansas City where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African-American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine.

Throughout the throes of the Red Summer and race riots across the Midwest, Ivoe risks her freedom and life to call attention to the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system.

This epic vision of hardships and injustices defines an era while offering a compelling story of triumph against the odds and a moving account of one woman's struggle for equality that belongs alongside Jazz by Toni Morrison and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.