Carolyn Holbrook’s life is peopled with ghosts—of the girl she was, the selves she shed and those who have caught up to her, the wounded and kind and malevolent spirits she’s encountered, and also the beloved souls she’s lost and those she never knew who beg to have their stories told. “Now don’t you go stirring things up,” one ghostly aunt counsels. Another smiles encouragingly: “Don’t hold back, child. Someone out there needs to hear what you have to say.”
Once a pregnant sixteen-year-old incarcerated in the Minnesota juvenile justice system, now a celebrated writer, arts activist, and teacher, Carolyn Holbrook has heeded the call to tell the story of her life. In a memoir woven of moments of reckoning, she summons stories born of silence, stories held inside, untold stories stifled by pain or prejudice or ignorance.
Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify won the 2021 Minnesota Book Award in the Memoir and Autobiography category, and was named a 2021 honoree by the Society of Midland Authors in the Biography and Memoir Category.
"Carolyn Holbrook’s remarkable book testifies to the power of the arts to heal her own life traumas, both historical and more recent. We see and hear her learn to speak up, and to claim space, in a world designed to keep silent or remove people like her." —Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies*
"Carolyn Holbrook is steadfast in her work to break free of constrictions that harm one’s spirit, knowing them to be racially, economically, and culturally imposed. Honest and perceptive stories of her experiences illuminate how her basic acts to create, over and over again, make for a life whose purpose and meaning resonate with her readers." —Cindy Gehrig, retired president, Jerome Foundation
"Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify is a powerful portrait of a life fueled by hope and faith in art and the artfulness of self, others, and community. Carolyn Holbrook’s social observations and personal remembrances cut across lines of race, class, and generational divides, deep into the heart of who we all are to one another at our most fundamental level of creative being. You will shiver, laugh, cry, cheer, stomp, want to sing, and, perhaps most indelibly of all, by the grace of this bold book and its author’s beautiful invocation, you too will feel inspired and empowered to write what lives deepest within you back into its vibrant fullness." —Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night
Here Holbrook poignantly traces the path from her troubled childhood to her leadership positions in the Twin Cities literary community, showing how creative writing can be a powerful tool for challenging racism and the healing ways of the storyteller’s art.
