PRAISE
“Powerfully important and deeply moving, SAY I’M DEAD is a story of race, family, and identity. E. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a black father and a white mother — yet how and why it took her years to claim both heritages, and to unearth the secrets that defined her family, testifies to the complicated history of race relations in America. The family's changes over time mirror what our country has gone through and continues to wrestle with. Her story will both inspire and educate.”
―Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body, winner of the Lambda Literary Award
“With unflinching honesty, E. Dolores Johnson shares an enthralling story of identity, independence, family and love. This timely and beautifully written memoir ends on a complicated yet hopeful note, something we need in this time of racial strife.”
-De'Shawn Charles Winslow, Author of In West Mills, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
“During the 1940s, it was better to disappear or die than break anti-miscegenation laws. When Dolores searches and finds her white mother’s estranged family, “Say I’m Dead,” is the response that Ella, the writer’s mother, tells the writer to give. The prose is clear, sharp, and insightful, and the writer’s quest to find the truth about her family is as gripping as any mystery. Through one family’s story, the memoir explores the tragedy of how racism divides us and also how one family moves beyond fear and bias. A must-read memoir for readers interested in a daughter’s courageous search for her history, which is inextricably intertwined with the story of race in America.”
―Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Nonfiction
“Say I’m Dead is not only a candid, compelling, and ultimately hopeful story of one woman’s quest to understand her family and herself through the lens of identity; it is also the story of an American identity riddled with secrets, lies, grievance, and thinly-veiled shame. In telling her own alternately painful and exhilarating history, E. Dolores Johnson is subtly asking us all to turn the mirror on ourselves.”
― Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
“Say I’m Dead is a beautiful and probing family history of a woman’s deep secret: she left behind her white family in 1940s Indiana, to marry a Black man in New York. Decades before the Loving V. Virginia Supreme Court case overturned anti-miscegenation laws, Ella and Charles affirmed DuBois’ prescient theory, that the problem of the twentieth century was indeed the problem of the color line. Their mixed-race daughter lives on the color line, a black woman who comes to question her white background. This compelling story with related themes of race, class, education, and history—furthers the exigent discussions of biraciality in the United States.”
―Dr. Donavan L. Ramon, Kentucky State University, author of the forthcoming monograph, Betraying Their Colored Descent: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing
PRESS
New York Post: read here; by Melkorka Licea, June 6, 2020
Buffalo News: Love Can Overcome Race by Mark Sommer, Oct. 11, 2020
Boston Globe Interview: read here
Boston Globe, Race and Family: By Nina MacLaughlin Globe Correspondent, June 4, 2020
WBUR The ARTery July 7, 2020 NEWS In Memoir 'Say I'm Dead,' An Author Unveils Family Secrets And Confronts Racial Identity
AWARDS
National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Literary Award
VIDEO INTERVIEWS
WCVB TV CityLine: Looking deeper into a family's history (wcvb.com) March 2024
Video of Book Talk with Boston Public Library and the Museum of African American History . Watch:
https://forum-network.org/lectures/meet-author-e-dolores-johnson/
Video comments on racial unrest: https://youtu.be/HICQwDnpWE8
Video Book Talk from Harvard Bookstore : watch
“Ideasphere” KCBX NPR affiliate
Others:
“Jefferson Exchange” NPR, syndicated
“Jim Engster Show,” WRFK, NPR affiliate
“Conversations with Peter Solomon” WIP FM and AM
“On the Bookshelf” WTBF
“The K-Zone Lunchbox” WPKZ
“Alternative Perspectives” WRFG-FM
“Morning Show”
“The Tom Sumner Program” WFOV