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In the early \\u201990s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she\\u2019d been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American Dream. At first, life in the U.S. was idyllic. But chasing good school districts with affordable housing left Tiffanie and her family constantly uprooted \\u2013 moving from Texas to Florida then back to New Jersey. As Tiffanie came of age in the suburbs, she began to ask questions about the binary Black and white American world. Why were the Black neighborhoods she lived in crime-ridden, and the multicultural ones safe? Why were there so few Black students in advanced classes at school, if there were any advanced classes at all? Why was it so hard for Black families to achieve stability? Why were Black girls treated as something other than worthy?

Drayton\\u2019s book,\\xa0Black American Refugee, expands on her 2020\\xa0New York Times\\xa0piece that details the pain and brokenness she experienced while living in the U.S. and why she ultimately left, returning to Trinidad and Tobago. In her book, she examined the intersection of her personal experiences and the broader cultural and historical ramifications of American racism and global white supremacy. Through the experiences of her family, as well as her own, she illuminated the toll that a lifetime of racism can take and evokes a critical question: Can Black people ever realize true emancipation here in the \\u201cland of the free?\\u201d

Tiffanie Drayton\\xa0is a mother, world traveler, and journalist whose work has been featured in\\xa0The New York Times,\\xa0Vox,\\xa0Marie Claire,\\xa0Playboy, and\\xa0Salon,\\xa0among other outlets. She has published two non-fiction young adult books,\\xa0Developing Political Leadership Skills\\xa0(2019) and\\xa0Coping with Gun Violence\\xa0(2018). She grew up in the United States and currently lives with her family in Tobago.

Krystal A. Sital\\xa0is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir\\xa0Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad\\xa0(2018). A PEN America Literary Award finalist and Hertog Fellow, her work has appeared in\\xa0ELLE,\\xa0The\\xa0New York Times Magazine,\\xa0The\\xa0New York Times,\\xa0Well,\\xa0Salon,\\xa0Catapult,\\xa0Today\\u2019s Parent,\\xa0LitHub,\\xa0Brain Child, the\\xa0Caribbean Writer, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing, gender and sexuality, business writing, and peoples and cultures of the Caribbean at Fairleigh Dickinson University and at New Jersey City University. She now teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College on Lake Tahoe. Krystal was born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and moved to the United States in 1999. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.

Buy the Book: Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream (Hardcover)\\xa0from Third Place Books

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