My Heart Wears No Colors

How does a progressive woman with southern roots confront the racial tension that exists in our country today? In these poems, Nancy Owen Nelson grapples with how to embrace her ancestry while resisting, as Rev. Dr. Stephen Butler Murray states, “the social sins that drench the soil of that beloved ground” on which her ancestors are buried. The poems move from the violence of the 2017 Charlottesville incident though Nelson’s family history, focusing on women who loved and sustained their families and men who, farmers, fought for the Confederacy, narrative accounts of former slaves, and finally, to the 20th century Civil Rights Movement. Author Judith Hillman Paterson calls My Heart Wears No Colors “a cycle of poems portraying four generations [including the author] trying to come to terms with their roots in a sometimes violent, often racist, Deep South.”