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About the Author

Laura Alexandra Harris is an Assistant Professor of English, World Literature, and Black Studies at Pitzer College in Los Angeles County, California. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego. Laura publishes in the areas of literary criticism, feminist and queer studies, Black studies, African diasporic studies, and fiction and poetry. Her publications are featured in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and African American Review.

Laura Alexandra Harris

What reviewers said...

Harris writes with the irreverence and drama usually associated with Black drag queens. She does not fear being dubbed an angry Black bitch. In the catch-22 universe revealed in her analysis of power relations, the dismissive moniker is an acronym for Black Intellectual Tenaciously Critiquing Humanity; the most brilliant jewel in her welfare queen crown. Harris embraces Fredrick Douglas’s 19th-century maxim, “agitate, agitate, agitate” as a guiding mantra steeling her against the daily assaults to the mind, body,and spirit of a Black, lesbian, single-mother, working-class-academic poet.
~Phyllis J. Jackson, Filmmaker, Comrade Sister: Voices of Women in the Black Panther Party

Driven by a desire for social justice, Laura Harris offers an innovative resistance narrative that challenges the stereotypes and exposes the lies of contemporary U.S. "race" rhetoric, identity categories, welfare "reform," and pseudo-multiculturalism in the academy. Notes is a transgressive, provocative book–a much needed, subversive message from the Ivory Tower.
~AnaLouise Keating, co-editor, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Associate Professor, Texas Woman's University

Notes from a Welfare Queen in the Ivory Tower

Author: Laura Alexandra Harris
Publication Date: September 2002
ISBN: 1-929712-04-9
Price: $12.95 (US)
176 pages, Trade Paperback, 5.5 x 8.25

About the book:

In a semi-autobiographical collection of poetry, fiction, letters, and essays, Notes from a Welfare Queen in The Ivory Tower is an act of everyday resistance. Welfare feminism, familial histories, black diasporas, class dynamics, queer love, and academia converge to create a genuine anti-heroine out of the publicly despised and

misrepresented welfare queen while advocating political strategies that include, among other things, stealing your education.

Notes from a Welfare Queen in The Ivory Tower positions the personal as public art and gives expression to a voice often ignored in literary spheres. Laura Alexandra Harris's writing not only complicates essentialist identity politics and postmodern notions of transcendent identity but her sardonic humor and biting irony prods at an everyday political economy continually directed against women of color.

Highlights:

* The title essay "Notes from a Welfare Queen in The Ivory Tower" is also featured in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (Routledge, September 2002) edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating

* Nominated for the American Library Association 2002 STONEWALL BOOK AWARD

* Reading Tour Schedule - Bluestockings Bookstore (NYC), Oct. 19th; Nuyorican Poets Café (NYC), Oct. 22nd; Audre Lorde Project (NYC) "Poetry, Music, and Reflections", Oct. 26th; Midnight Special Bookstore (Calif.), Nov. 16th.

* Featured in Foreword Magazine, "The New Culture Today's Feminist Presses Embody Activism and Critical Thinking," by Nicole Braun, January/February 2003.

Press Releases:

November 1, 2002

New York, NY – The debut publication of NOTES FROM A WELFARE QUEEN IN THE IVORY TOWER by Laura Alexandra Harris comes at a propitious moment as congress continues to delay action concerning issues of welfare reform and the reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) legislation.

"The easiest way to reform welfare is through education," stated Harris about her own experience as a single mother on welfare and her book - a semi-autobiographical collection that confronts issues of welfare feminism, black diasporas, class dynamics, queer love, and academia.

Harris had put herself through college and completed her PhD from the University of California at San Diego, Calif., and recalls how she decided against telling the welfare assistance office about her educational pursuits since they would have cut her benefits and keeping silent about receiving welfare to her classmates.

“It was embarrassing, as you can imagine, how the university perceived you when you turned up at their office with a welfare form in hand.”

NOTES FROM A WELFARE QUEEN IN THE IVORY TOWER is an act of everyday resistance. Harris creates a genuine anti-heroine out of the publicly despised and misrepresented welfare queen while advocating political strategies that include, among other things, stealing your education. NOTES FROM A WELFARE QUEEN positions the personal as public art and gives expression to a voice often ignored in literary spheres. The title essay "Notes from a Welfare Queen in The Ivory Tower" is also featured in THIS BRIDGE WE CALL HOME (Routledge, 2002).