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This Past Was Waiting For Me

By Sarah Trembath

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​“Sarah Trembath’s voice is an authentic, deeply passionate one, calling us to task for the ways in which we have distorted or ignored the painful parts of our national history.”
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- ADAM HOCHSCHILD, ​New York Times bestselling author of King Leopold's Ghost

​In this groundbreaking, genre-bending book, American University professor Sarah Trembath braids poetry, art, personal essay, and scholarly analysis to salvage Black history from its misconstructions and misrememberings. This Past Was Waiting for Me distills Trembath’s decades-long body of academic and artistic work into a cohesive artistic experience that drives empathy and combats misinformation. 

Trembath corrects the historical record while adding to it—she reflects on both the horrors and the richness, holding back on neither. Her account of history covers a swathe of eras and events from the Middle Passage to the present, including contemporary coloniality, the genocidal wars abroad, and an ongoing, interwoven account of the gentrification of her old neighborhood of Shaw in Washington, DC. She draws upon the roles of students, teachers, artists, and activists as the sources of hope for a transformed Western world.

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Sarah Trembath teaches writing, storytelling, and literature at American University, where she has been a faculty member since 2014 and is currently the executive director of AU’S Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Dr. Trembath is a poet and decolonial scholar who writes extensively on matters of social justice, and is a recipient of the American Studies Association’s Gloria Anzaldúa Award. She lives in Baltimore with her family.

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Praise for This Past Was Waiting For Me

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“Sarah Trembath’s voice is an authentic, deeply passionate one, calling us to task for the ways in which we have distorted or ignored the painful parts of our national history.” 

​ADAM HOCHSCHILD, ​New York Times bestselling author of King Leopold’s Ghost, To End All Wars, and Bury the Chains

​“Sarah Trembath has written a bold, brave book about Amer-ica, history, and race. If ever there was a moment when we as a nation needed this book, that time is now. This is a book all Americans should read.” 

MARITA GOLDEN, ​bestselling author of Long Distance Life, The Strong Black Woman, and The Wide Circumference of Love

​“A masterful mix of the academic and the poetic... This Past Was Waiting for Me shies away from no truths...uncomfortable or otherwise. Thank you, Sarah Trembath...for championing the magic and truth and story of our beautiful, brilliant, re-silient Blackness. And for extolling our warriors, our shamans and our guides. This book, I feel, is the new travelers guide for the American. Tells us where we’ve been, where we are...and how to get to the next place.”

URSULA RUCKER, ​poet and award-winning international recording artist

​“Sarah Trembath offers here a re-treatment of history that al-ways rings true. This Past Was Waiting for Me is a study in the practice of writing as a vehicle for artistic, political, and spir-itual consciousness. Trembath is a serious writer, passionate about her purpose and generous with her spirit, demonstrating that writing is voice and that voice is action.”

RICH GARELLA, ​filmmaker and documentarian

​“My GOD can this woman write. I read This Past Was Waiting for Me in a state of euphoric enthrallment. There is no saccha-rin here, no nostalgia, and Trembath stands on the terra firma of historians, elders, and ancestors. She may launch this book from Philly/DC, but any student, professor, activist, or revo-lutionary in the Congo or Brixton or Bosnia will dig it. I can’t wait ’til my 18- and 20-year-old children read this.”

KENNETH CARROLL, ​poet, author of So What! For the White Dude Who Said This Ain’t Poetry

​“Sarah Trembath’s multi-genre, interdisciplinary endeavor, This Past Was Waiting for Me, tells difficult truths about our nation’s history. Based on years of careful scholarly research and study, its mixture of poetry, essay, and academic article helps bring compassion, originality, and insight to material we need to confront in order to understand our present moment and our present pain. From its righting of historical inaccuracies through meticulously-researched primary source documents, to its hopeful attempts to reach across racial divides and heal some of our national wounds, to its powerful lyric poetry and images—all done with excruciating honesty, kindness, and sometimes even humor—this book refuses to let us look away or remain ignorant. I can’t think of a more timely and neces-sary antidote to our current political turmoil.” 

HOLLYND KARAPETKOVA, ​poet, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship recipient

​“At least half of what I’ve learned about DC since I moved here 30 years ago I know from Sarah Trembath’s multiform and multi-voiced chronicle This Past Was Waiting for Me, a galvanizing portrait of a people and their city. It’s not just the deep research, poetic beauty, incisive critique, and vital recollections that make This Past such a valuable record of gentrification, change, and resistance since the ’80s in what used to be known as Chocolate City. It’s that every fact, every encounter, every indelible memory, and every missed turn is steeped in painful and joyous experiences and imbued with the wisdom and humor of a voice able both to live fully in the moment and to grasp the meaning of that moment for the past she lived through and the future she refuses to stop imagining into existence.”

DAVID PIKE, ​author of After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century

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