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About Finding La Negrita

Meet Dakarai, a famed African sculptor who must buy his freedom once he is stolen into slavery and separated from his newborn daughter, Jendayi. Her mother has died in childbirth, in the hold of a Middle Passage ship. Husband and child are left to reconcile their grief over her absence and somehow forge a new life in the New World. Finding La Negrita spans time and space as it captures Dakarai and Jendayi’s reunion, ripe with the secrets and sacrifices a single father confronts while raising a strong-minded young girl coming of age in an era with a precarious line between freedom and enslavement. In those margins, and unbeknownst to each other, they both dare to pursue dangerous new loves beyond the limits of what colonial society will permit. But at what cost to themselves and each other? And in the midst of all this, a future holy relic is born, under circumstances that could put their freedom, if not their very lives, on the line.

Awards

 IPPY Silver Award for Best Historical Fiction, 2023

Nominated for Best Debut Novel by the Hurston/Wright Legacy Foundation, 2023

Buy Your Copy Here

“A powerfully evocative emotional narrative . . . a journey into a community created by free and enslaved Africans and filled with joy, pain, and wisdom.”

Dorothy E. Mosby, Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College

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Upcoming events

Natasha in conversation with Professor Tamara Walker

Diana Event Oval, Barnard College

Friday, October 27, 2023 at 4pm EST

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