Turn Where: A Geography of Home

A probing essay collection that chronicles one woman’s complicated quest to find home in a fractured America, from the award-winning author of Field Study

“In Chet’la Sebree’s sensitive and tender hands, this book’s quest (and question) of home is captivating. An intimate rendering of the life of a Black woman artist.”—Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and author of Black in Blues

At eighteen, Chet’la Sebree began, as she writes, “perfecting the art of leaving.” After moving out of her parents’ house in Delaware for college, the lauded poet, essayist, and academic rarely kept the same address for more than two years—bouncing from city to city, country to country, perpetually in search of her next adventure.

For Sebree, traveling has been a life-long passion, forged during family road trips and vacations with friends; college study abroad programs in Europe; and far-flung writing residencies and job opportunities. She dreamed of one day taking her own Great American Road Trip, Jack Kerouac–style—except refashioned as a millennial Black woman who had also begun considering her next chapter: settling down and starting a solo fertility journey.

During the pandemic, Sebree thought she might finally get her chance to hit the road. But then, George Floyd was murdered, following the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubrey, and so many others. As America continued to reveal its most violent self, Sebree started to wrestle with the very idea of home: Where do I belong in a country not meant for people like me to survive? What does this mean for a child I might bring into it?

In Turn (W)here, Sebree turns to the page for answers, seamlessly weaving memoir with history and cultural criticism in a collection of inventive essays bound by themes of movement, home, inheritance, and belonging. Spanning continents, geographies, and states of mind, Sebree lights a pathway for the wanderer, the seeker—anyone propelled into the unknown by the desire for a place to truly belong.

Chet'la Sebree is the author of Blue Opening, Field Study, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Poetry. Her essays and poems have been anthologized in Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, and others. Sebree is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University.