After the passing of their volatile patriarch, Justine and her adult children find themselves within one another’s daily orbit in trying ways. Justine, the new family matriarch, struggles to connect with her adult children and refuses to acknowledge the details of her murky past. Raynah, the unruly spitfire social activist, is determined to uncover the truth of that past so that she can move on with her present. Lois, the struggling real estate agent, contends with the reality of white flight while also dealing with the older emotional toll of violently losing her son. And Theo, the public servant, battles with the memory of violence, love lost, and his own sexuality.

Through these linked perspectives, Bone Broth delivers the touchstones of an inequitable society: violence, suppression, and the human capacity to continue in the face of extreme adversity. With clear, cutting, biting prose, Ellis explores how trauma affects family dynamics, how it permeates every aspect of life, and how reckoning and reconciliation require the strength and courage to confront all the broken, jagged memories from the past.

Lyndsey Ellis is a St. Louis-born fiction writer, essayist, and cultural worker. With a BA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, she strives to explore intergenerational trauma, hardship, and struggle. In 2016, she was a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and in 2018, she received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for fiction. Bone Broth is her first novel.

F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections: ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018), and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Brown holds fellowships from both Cave Canem and Kundiman, and was selected by Poets & Writers as one of their ten notable Debut Poets of 2014. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, such as The Academy of American Poets, The PBS News Hour, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), The Chicago Quarterly Review (CQR), The Southern Humanities Review, Faultline, and Furious Flower: seeding the future of African American Poetry, The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles to name a few.

An educator for 25 years, Brown currently teaches full-time at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, while also serving as the Poet in Residence at the University of California, Irvine.

He is co-founder and co-curator of two transformative reading series: un::fade::able and The Friday Framework. Each reading series examines restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism. The Friday Framework, hosted by Hidden Timber Books, featuring BIPOC poets whose work examines how to create better societal or personal structures.

Skylit: Bone Broth by Lyndsey Ellis, with F Douglas Brown