Everybody Come Alive A Memoir in Essays

by Alvis Walker, Marcie

• ISBN13: 9780593443729
• ISBN10: 0593443721
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-05-30
• Publisher: Convergent Books

Summary

A dazzling memoir that explores what it means to become fully alive and holy when we embrace the silenced stories we’ve inherited—from the creator of Black Coffee with White Friends.

“Marcie Alvis Walker writes with an honesty that is both dauntless and compassionate.”—Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh

In her debut book, Everybody Come Alive, Marcie Alvis Walker invites readers into a deeply intimate and illuminating memoir comprising lyrical essays and remembrances of being a curious child of the seventies and eighties, raised under the critical and watchful eye of Jim Crow matriarchs who struggled to integrate their lives and remain whole.

While swimming in rivers of racial trauma and racial reckoning, Alvis Walker explores her earliest memories—of abandonment and erasure, of her mother’s mental illness and incarceration, and of her ongoing struggles with perfectionism and body dysmorphia—in hopes of leaving a healed and whole legacy for her own child. Nostalgic but unflinching, candid yet tender, Everybody Come Alive is an invitation to be vulnerable along with the author as she unravels all the beauty and terror of God, race, and gender’s imprint on her life.

This is a coming-of-age journey touching on the bittersweet pain and joy of what it takes to become a person who embraces being Black, a woman, and holy in America. Alvis Walker’s unforgettable writing challenges readers to not only see and hold her story as being fully human, but also to see and hold their own stories too.

Author Biography

Marcie Alvis-Walker is the creator of the blog and Instagram feed Black Coffee with White Friends. Marcie is also the creator of Mockingbird History lessons for adults, where she shares the missing narratives of history, and her most recent project, Black Eyed Bible Study, where she dives deeper into the Bible from a womanist perspective. She lives in Austin with her husband, daughter, and their dog, Evie.