Sarah Smith Ducksworth has been writing and telling stories all her life. Her prior published writings are primarily nonfictional works appearing in journals, newspapers, and encyclopedias—which include The New York Times, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, The Magill Series of Masterpieces of Literature, and Masterplots. Her 1995 literary essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, included in The Stowe Debate: Rhetorics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has been often cited in other scholarly works and analyzed by students in term papers. Knowledge of her study of the Underground Movement in New Jersey and Pennsylvania led to her writing a 2005 foreword to the 5th edition of William Still’s, classic, The Underground Railroad for Plexus Press and to her participation in a PBS documentary entitled The William Still Story in 2011. In 2015 Sarah published this book, her first book of poetry, which was favorably reviewed by several literary critics and profiled in the Independent Press, a local New Jersey newspaper, and in the Star Ledger, the largest state-wide New Jersey newspaper. The book, then entitled No Crystal Stair, received a gold star for literary excellence. This current version of the book, under a new name, contains important revisions and qualitative changes to lines and stanzas in more than a dozen poems. |