GRAVITY IS STRONGER HERE is a creative nonfiction montage made from photographs by award-winning photographer Phyllis B. Dooney and docu-poems by critically acclaimed writer Jardine Libaire; it’s a book about looking for America in America. In 2011, Dooney visited Greenville, Mississippi, starting a five-year-long documentary project featuring Halea (who is openly gay) and her dynamic Southern American family.

Greenville is a key tile in our national mosaic as it represents the American boom town left in the wake of a changing global economy. The book presents us with a place/space where love for a gay daughter and an Evangelical love of God can exist in one mother, violence and tenderness in the same relationship, and hope and hopelessness in the same daily life. These multiple truths are often lost in stories that collapse American families into constituencies.

GRAVITY provides less an imposed narrative than a consciousness; the subjects are within reach — you can smell the musk, cigarette smoke, meat cooking in the backyard, a magnolia blooming by the door. The experience inside the pages is a nearness, a grazing of shoulders with another’s humanity. The story is extended by its multimedia components which can be found online at gravityisstrongerhere.com. GRAVITY IS STRONGER HERE was awarded Honorable Mention by The Center for Documentary Studies’ Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize in 2016.

About the Author

Phyllis B. Dooney is a social documentary photographer and visual storyteller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Feature Shoot, American Photo, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Prison Photography and elsewhere online and in print. Phyllis was awarded first place for The Center’s Editor’s Choice Prize in 2015. In 2016 she was a Screen Projects mentee, and highlighted in the 4th annual New York Times portfolio review.

Alison Morley is a photo editor, consultant, and educator. She has been the chair of the documentary photography and photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography in New York since 2000.

Jardine Libaire is an American writer based in Austin, TX. Her most recent novel White Fur is forthcoming from Hogarth in May 2017. She was a winner of the Hopwood Award and the Glascock Poetry Prize. She volunteers for Truth Be Told, a writing program for incarcerated women in Texas.

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