Heather Tosteson

Families: the Frontline of Pluralism Heather Tosteson

Marc Notes: An anthology of stories, memoirs, and poetry that celebrates racial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity in family life. Publisher Marketing: FAMILIES: THE FRONTLINE OF PLURALISM Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett, Editors Wising Up Press The difficulties of living up close and personal with diversity-of sensibility, race, sexual orientation, culture, class, or religion-is the subject of the stories, memoirs, and poetry in this anthology. In these works by thirty-five contemporary writers we learn what it means to absorb the intimate implications of being of mixed race, to be raised by a parent who suffers from being on the wrong side of history, to carry the burden of immigrant parents' self-sacrifice. We learn what it means to fully live out choices to marry across religion or culture, to hear our children chatter happily in a language we can't speak, to feel our imagination try to find its way into a world completely alien to us, still raw with the wounds of civil war. We learn about the tension-and love-that develop between siblings when one is disabled; the violence that carries across marriages; what it means to create relationships with children after divorce, or to make a space in our own heart for the children of step-children. We learn how completely parenthood shifts our priorities, whether we are lesbian parents adopting children from Guatemala, a single mother expanding her family of two with another child from China, a lesbian mother shifting sexual orientation to create a stable family clan, a white poet fostering a black child from an inner-city ghetto. Contributor Bio:  Brockett, Charles D Charles D. Brockett received his Ph. D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina in 1974. He is the author of Land, Power, and Poverty: Agrarian Transformation and Political Conflict in Central America, which was selected as a Choice 'Outstanding Academic Book' of 1988. He is also the author of numerous articles published in scholarly journals and edited volumes, including the American Political Science Review and Latin American Research Review. In recognition of his work, he has received Fulbright awards for participation in the South America Today program in 1995 and for lecturing/research in Guatemala in 2000, the John B. Stephenson Fellowship from the Appalachian College Association, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.