Again, since the focus of this issue is children of incarcerated parents, bandele and I spoke primarily about incarceration and the impact it has on children and families. In Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother’s Story (Collins, 2009), bandele tells readers about the deportation notice that changed her life, and spends some time describing her visits to Rashid, but mostly this is a story about raising a daughter as a single parent in New York. Ultimately, Rashid was released and deported to his native Guyana, where he lives today. Though when she met him Rashid had already spent nine years in prison, bandele would “do” several more years with him as his wife and the mother of their child. In The Prisoner’s Wife: A Memoir (Pocket Books, 1999), bandele narrates her relationship with the man who would become her husband: Rashid. As a result, at a certain point during our conversation, I put aside my questions and just listened. I reread her books, reviewed interviews she had given, and located articles written so long ago that bandele herself had probably forgotten all about them! Yet I needn’t have worried bandele is thoughtful and earnest, a good listener and just as eager to provide others with the benefit of her myriad and intelligent musings. However, because I wanted to keep the focus on children of incarcerated parents, I painstakingly prepared questions ahead of time. I have long admired asha bandele’s writing, so there was much I wanted to ask her.

She directs the Advocacy Grants Program at Drug Policy Alliance and lives in Brooklyn with her daughter, Nisa.“Every day we choose prisons, we don’t choose children or ourselves.” All of Bandele’s dreams of a happy life disintegrated, and what follows in her second memoir, Something Like Beautiful, is her struggle to hold down her job as an editor at Essence, to raise her daughter, to balance her finances, to fight discrimination.īandele is also the author of two collections of poems and the novel, Daughter. But when their daughter was 6 months old, Bandele learned that her husband, Rashid, would be deported if he was indeed released.

With the hope that they would live as a couple in the outside world, Bandele became pregnant with a daughter during a conjugal visit. The book went through four printings in hardcover and twelve in paperback. Award-winning author and journalist Asha Bandele’s first memoir, The Prisoner’s Wife, told the story of her marriage to an incarcerated man she met when performing her poetry at prisons.

Daughter by asha bandele