Reform welfare through education," advocates Laura Harris, author of NOTES FROM A WELFARE QUEEN IN THE IVORY TOWER -- American Library Association 2002 STONEWALL BOOK AWARD nominee

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 authorizes new legislative measures in welfare-to-work programs that stipulates further cut-backs on job training, education, and childcare benefits and restrict recipients from taking vocational education classes.

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 authorizes new legislative measures in welfare-to-work programs that stipulates further cut-backs on job training, education, and childcare benefits and restrict recipients from taking vocational education classes.

The easiest way to reform welfare is through education," stated Harris, who used her own experience as a single mother on welfare to spur the publication of her semi-autobiographical collection of letters, essays, poetry, and fiction that confronts issues of welfare feminism, black diasporas, class dynamics, and academia.

   Perhaps the idea of all these well-educated women flooding the job market makes government officials anxious," said Harris. I wanted an education but I also needed to take care of my daugher. If I had told the public assistance agency about school, they would have cut my benefits and cancelled my food stamps and medi-cal."

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.

Laura Harris is an Assistant Professor of English, World Literature, and Black Studies at Pitzer College in Los Angeles County, California. Her publications are featured in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and African American Review.

Harris embraces Frederick Douglass 19th-century maxim, 'agitate, agitate, agitate as a guiding mantra steeling her against the daily assaults to mind, body, and spirit of a Black, lesbian, single-mother, working-class-academic poet."~ Phyllis J. Jackson, PhD, 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."~AnaLouise Keating, co-editor, THIS BRIDGE WE CALL HOME, Associate Professor, Texas Woman's University

NOTES FROM A WELFARE QUEEN IN THE IVORY TOWER (Laura Alexandra Harris), 176 pp, Price (US) $12.95, ISBN 1-929712-04-9, Trade Softcover, October 2002, Distribution: Baker & Taylor

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