Los Ángeles writer Cassandra Lane has been a writer since she turned 11 and told her mother. Since, she’s been studying and honing her craft as a journalist and editor, teaching others how to write and read deeply and crafting her own stories. Growing up poor and Black in the South—the land, the dialects, the people, the stories, the spirituality—influenced her deeply and shaped her as a writer.

Lane moved to L.Á. in 2001 to peruse an MFA in creative writing at Antioch University and never left. Since then, she’s become Editor-in-Chief of L.A. Parent Magazine and a mother. And now an author of the memoir We Are Bridges, winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, published by Feminist Press.

We Are Bridges is about what happens when Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at 35 and how that sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between 20^th century rural South and present day Los Ángeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents, Mary Magdalene Magee and Burt Bridges and Burt’s lynching at the hands of vengeful white men, upon finding the lack of historic documentation, specifically, about her great-grandfather.

We Are Bridges uses creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure, so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for the future. This is Cassandra Lane’s debut.