ABSTRACT
Dr. Nicole Dezrea Jenkins begins part I by telling her experience as a second-grade student whose teacher and classmates learn of her father’s incarceration. With her father incarcerated for most of her childhood, she writes how his absence became normal, and eventually, so did the random phone calls from jail. Through the ebbs and flows in her identity as a Black child of an incarcerated parent, she provides an in-depth analysis of her upbringing with a father who was consistently in and out of prison. Readers will learn how her love for her father never changed. Creatively telling stories of her lived experiences with her incarcerated father, her family, and living in society, she realizes they shaped her adulthood.
