Sagashus Levingston

press release: Sagashus Levingston wrote Infamous Mothers: Women Who’ve Gone Through the Belly of Hell and Brought Something Good Back, because she kept meeting remarkable women who had survived and turned around sometimes harrowing lives – yet no one was recording their stories. Levingston will be at the store Thursday, Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.

She grew up on Chicago’s South Side and earned an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Illinois-Chicago. Levingston came to Madison for graduate school a decade ago, got her masters in Afro-American studies and is currently working toward a doctorate in English.     

An early feminist author, Adrienne Rich, saw the institution of motherhood as it is commonly perceived as suffocating and stifling – only in breaking from convention could she empower herself and in doing so become the best mother to her children she could be.

The 20 black women Levingston profiles in Infamous Mothers – a beautifully designed coffee table book – may not have consciously rebelled in the manner of Adrienne Rich, but circumstances forced them to if not a rebellion, then a reckoning. They survived – abuse, trauma, addiction – and came out on the other side as “infamous” mothers, strong, resilient, determined to find a good life for their children.