Mainline Mama: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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A powerful and wrenchingly intimate memoir about the formidable challenge of raising a family separated by prison walls and how we can fight back against a broken byzantine system.

Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was grown. Within a year she was pregnant, and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a mainline mama, a parent facing the impossible task of raising a childwhile still growing up herselfwith an incarcerated partner.

In this devastating and triumphant memoir, Keeonna recalls her harrowing journey as a Mainline Mama, from learning to overcome the exhausting difficulties of navigating the carceral system in the United States, to transforming herself into an advocate for other women like herthe predominantly Black and brown women left behind to pick up the pieces of their families and fractured lives.

Keeonna speaks frankly about the depression and suicidal thoughts that threatened to defeat her, how she learned to rebuild her broken relationship with a mother that lost trust in her, and how time eased the shame, guilt, and stigma of being a young Black teen mom with a partner behind bars. She offers inspiration and solace, showing how to create moments of beauty, humanity, and love in a place designed to break spirits, such as picking the perfect wedding dress for a ceremony in a state prison visiting room.

Mainline Mama is about creating self-love and communitycrucial acts of radical resistance against a prison industrial complex that is designed to dehumanize and to separate and shut away incarcerated individuals and their loved ones from the world.

Reviews

"Mainline Mama is a necessary memoir that is as tough as it is tender and as raw as it is refined. Keeonna Harris has written an abolitionist classic." -- Myriam Gurba, author of Creep: Accusations and Confessions

"Mainline Mama is love letter to the women whose lives collide with our country's sprawling prison system. Keeonna Harris's memoir about her years raising a child with an incarcerated partner shows how a well-seasoned spaghetti noodle can taste of devotion, and a state-approved kiss can be an act of resistance. She and the other "mainline mamas" care not only for the men inside, but for each other. Harris shows how that care sustains her on her long journey through the carceral system, and finally, how it helps her find her way home."
-- Lisa Riordan Seville, reporter, filmmaker and senior producer on the film team at Pro Publica

In Mainline Mama Keeonna Harris tells a frank, revealing and sometimes heartbreaking story of love in its many forms. Harris' growth from a very young mother navigating a hostile prison system that holds her kids' father, to a woman with the confidence to live life on her own terms, inspires. Mainline Mama offers a poignant portrayal of the power of family, against all odds, even as Harris evokes a difficult and beautiful discovery of who she is and what she wants. Keeonna Harris shares an unforgettable story of how love binds and shapes who we become, no matter the circumstances. -- Piper Kerman, Author of Orange is the New Black

"Mainline Mama is the rare book written to shake a system off its bloody hinges and as importantly, the writing here makes a home of the faithful space between head and heart, between yearning and wishing. Just an absolutely awesome and vigorous work of art. Keeonna Harris is a writer's writer, do you hear me." -- Kiese Laymon, Author of Heavy: An American Memoir

"This is a tender, smart and thoughtful book. Its pages are filled with beauty and disappointment and the hard won victories of a force of nature who grew up in the shadow of the prison." -- Reuben Jonathan Miller, MacArthur fellow and author of Halfway Home

This affecting dispatch from inside the carceral state is not to be missed. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Bio

Keeonna Harris is a writer, storyteller, mother of five, prison abolitionist, activist, and academic, born and raised in Watts and South-Central Los Angeles. She has received several honors, including a 2018-2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, a 2021 Tin House Summer Residency, a 2023 Baldwin Center for the Arts Residency, and a 2023 Hedgebrook Writer Fellowship as the 2023 Edith Wharton Resident. She is currently a 2024 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington. Keeonna is developing the "Borderland Project," a mental health and community support system for women forced to navigate carceral institutions to maintain connections with incarcerated persons. She lives in Seattle.