19 Feb: Randi Pink

Randi Pink, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, is a highly acclaimed author, educator, and jazz vocalist with a rich and diverse background. Randi’s most recent work, Under the Heron’s Light, set in the historic Great Dismal Swamps, evidences her commitment to navigating the intersection of books and history. Pink currently serves as Alabama’s 2024 Fellow for Literary Arts in South Art’s Inaugural Southern Literary Fellowships and 2025’s Alabama State Council of the Arts Fellow for Prose.

Website:https://www.wearethescribes.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/randi_pink/
BlueSky: @randipink.bsky.social
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Angel of Greenwood. (Feiwel & Friends, 2021) Isaiah Wilson is, on the surface, a town troublemaker, but is hiding that he is an avid reader and secret poet, never leaving home without his journal. Angel Hill is a loner, mostly disregarded by her peers as a goody-goody. Her father is dying, and her family’s financial situation is in turmoil. Though they’ve attended the same schools, Isaiah never noticed Angel as anything but a dorky, Bible toting church girl. Then their English teacher offers them a job on her mobile library, a three-wheel, two-seater bike. Angel can’t turn down the money and Isaiah is soon eager to be in such close quarters with Angel every afternoon.

But life changes on May 31, 1921 when a vicious white mob storms the Black community of Greenwood, leaving the town destroyed and thousands of residents displaced. Only then, Isaiah, Angel, and their peers realize who their real enemies are.

Girls Like Us. (Feiwel & Friends, 2019) Four teenage girls. Four different stories. What they all have in common is that they’re dealing with unplanned pregnancies.

It’s the summer of 1972, before Roe v. Wade. In rural Georgia, Izella is wise beyond her years, but burdened with the responsibility of her older sister, Ola, who has found out she’s pregnant. Their young neighbor, Missippi, is also pregnant, but doesn’t fully understand the extent of her predicament. When her father sends her to Chicago to give birth, she meets the final narrator, Susan, who is white and the daughter of an anti-choice senator.

Into White (Feiwel & Friends, 2016) LaToya Williams lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and attends a mostly white high school. It seems as if her only friend is her older brother, Alex. Toya doesn’t know where she fits in, but after a run-in with another student, she wonders if life would be different if she were . . . different. And then a higher power answers her prayer: to be “anything but black.”

Toya is suddenly white, blond, and popular. Now what?

We Are the Scribes.  (Feiwel & Friends, 2022) Ruth Fitz is surrounded by activism. Her mother is a senator who frequently appears on CNN as a powerful Black voice fighting for legislative social change within the Black community. Her father, a professor of African American history, is a walking encyclopedia, spouting off random dates and events. And her beloved older sister, Virginia, is a natural activist, steadily gaining notoriety within the community and on social media. Ruth, on the other hand, would rather sit quietly reading or writing in her journal.

When her family is rocked by tragedy, Ruth stops writing. As life goes on, Ruth’s mother is presented with a political opportunity she can’t refuse. Just as Senator Fitz is more absent, Ruth begins receiving parchment letters with a seal reading WE ARE THE SCRIBES, sent by Harriet Jacobs, the author of the autobiography and 1861 American classic, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Is Ruth dreaming? How has she been chosen as a “scribe” when she can barely put a sentence together? In a narrative that blends present with past, Randi Pink explores two extraordinary characters who channel their hopelessness and find their voices to make history.

Under the Heron’s Light. (Feiwel & Friends, 2024) On a damp night in 1722, Babylou Mac and her three siblings witness the murder of their mother at the hands of the local preacher’s son—so Babylou kills him in retaliation. With plantation dogs now on their heels, the four siblings breach the treacherous confines of the Great Dismal Swamp. Deeper and deeper into Dismal they delve, amid the biting moccasins and pitch-black waters, toward a refuge where they can live freely within the swamp’s natural—and supernatural—protection.

Three-hundred years later, college student Atlas comes home to North Carolina for the annual Bornday cookout and hog roast: a celebration of the fact that she and her three cousins were all born on the same day nineteen years ago, sharing a birthday with their Grannylou. But this Bornday, Grannylou’s usual riddles and folktales about a marvelous paradise deep in the Great Dismal Swamp start to take on a tangible quality. Change coming.

When Dismal calls, sucking Grannylou in, it’s up to Atlas and her cousins to uncover the history that the black waters hold. Centuries of family tension, with roots all over Virginia and North Carolina, are about to be dug up. Because Babylou and Grannylou are one and the same, and the power she helped cultivate hundreds of years ago—steeped in Black resistance, familial love, and the otherworldly mysteries of the Great Dismal Swamp—is bubbling back up. But so is a bitterness that runs deep as the swamp’s waters. And some are ready to take what they feel they’re owed.

Filed under: Book List, Creators