Tell us a little about your background.
I grew up in the remote hills of Alabama, where beetles and June bugs danced on the surface of the water pulled from the well, and the sicknesses caught from that water were treated with chicken soup and mustard plasters. My father’s love affair with alcohol tortured my mother, and often left us eight kids scared, confused, and without. Those days of childhood remained locked inside my heart. As I pursued a career in art, the memories became more insistent, demanding to be written.

Tell us a little about your award-winning book Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter.
Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter is a story about growing up in the South. I’ve tried to tell the anecdotes of our lives as I remember them: sometimes funny, sometimes horrific. As a source of entertainment for eight deprived children, my mother told us stories, drew pictures on scrap cardboard and recited poetry. She believed that beauty belonged to everyone - even us. Her great love for beauty has been her legacy to me. My book is the story of how my brothers and sisters and I were lifted toward survival, and finally rebirth, on the wings of art. The Pulitzer Prize winning screenwriter, Marsha Norman, is presently writing a screenplay of Zeus’s Daughter that will be produced by Goldie Hawn for a CBS movie.

What are you currently working on?
My second memoir, titled Singing to the Wild Cat, will be available in May 2003. It begins where Zeus’s Daughter left off. It’s the story of a single mom attempting to change her fate, and the fate of her child, through education. Of course, threads of Zeus’s Daughter run through it - since I’m writing about the same family, the same me.