Boy @ The Window: A Memoir - Tapa blanda

As a preteen Black male growing up in Mount Vernon, New York, there were a series of moments, incidents and wounds that caused me to retreat inward in despair and escape into a world of imagination. For five years I protected my family secrets from authority figures, affluent Whites and middle class Blacks while attending an unforgiving gifted-track magnet school program that itself was embroiled in suburban drama. It was my imagination that shielded me from the slights of others, that enabled my survival and academic success. It took everything I had to get myself into college and out to Pittsburgh, but more was in store before I could finally begin to break from my past.

Boy @ The Window is a coming-of-age story about the universal search for understanding on how any one of us becomes the person they are despite—or because of—the odds. It's a memoir intertwined with my own search for redemption, trust, love, success—for a life worth living. Boy @ The Window is about one of the most important lessons of all: what it takes to overcome inhumanity in order to become whole and human again.

Donald Earl Collins is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor of History with University of Maryland University College. A freelance and academic writer for more than fifteen years, he has written on topics such as multiculturalism, education reform and African American identity. His articles have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Washington Post, Teachers College Record, Academe Magazine and Radical Society. He is also the author of Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (iUniverse.com, 2004), an in-depth response to the conservative movement’s “Culture Wars” on all things “multicultural.”