This book is huge in size – one foot square – and in ambition and in execution. A companion c.d. will be released later this year. The heart of this book is seven poems, each about a page long (and these are big pages). They are each designed to convey the experiences of Cherokee women on the Trail of Tears when they were removed from the Southern Appalachian Mountains to Oklahoma by the U. S. Army in the 1830s at the command of President Andrew Jackson after the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that their removal was unlawful. The first poem and several of the illustrations are a tribute to the author’s grandfather, Horace Kephart (1862-1931) a St. Louis librarian who abandoned his family to live in Swain County, North Carolina, in the Smoky Mountain, and who write Our Southern Highlanders (1913), and books about camping and woodcraft and a pamphlet about the Cherokees who he admired and respected. Each poem is preceded by a prose introduction. A graduate of Duke and Villanova Law School, Janice Kephart has had a strikingly diverse career as a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission, as a entrepreneur in the field of identity security, and as a musician and spoken-word recording artist.
San Francisco: Blurb Publishing: 2018. 24 pages with full-page and partial page color and black-and-white drawings and photos. Hardback with dust jacket