978-1-942762-12-6
Pub Date: May 2016
Author: Cindy Brown Austin
When the horrific Newtown murders of twenty elementary school-aged children occurred in Connecticut in 2012, shock reverberated around the world. But in Connecticut’s poorest cities, like Hartford, where Cindy Brown Austin was born and raised, the untimely murder of inner-city urban youth had been occurring for years.
In the tradition of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Cinders is a searing coming-of-age memoir about the struggles of urban children being locked out of the American dream.
An Apostolic minister and former columnist for the Hartford Courant, Cindy has been profiled by the New York Times and published by Readers Digest and Essence magazines. A recipient fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and a finalist in Ebony Magazine’s annual fiction writing contest, she is also the author of By the Rivers of Babylon—her debut novel, which was published in 2007 by Strebor/Simon & Schuster.
Cindy’s writings are her way of documenting how violence and injustice impact urban children.
“If there is any justice beneath the moon, one hopes that this blistering memoir will not only shine a light on Cindy Brown Austin (who was once the subject of a New York Times feature), but also lure readers to her 2007 debut novel, appropriately titled By the Rivers of Babylon. As a writer and as a witness, she is luminous.”
—M. J. Moore, Neworld Review
For the past twenty-five years, Hartford native and licensed Apostolic minister Cindy Brown Austin has written and lectured about the tragedies and triumphs of urban New England life. Raised in the Hartford housing projects, Cindy is best known regionally for her editorials, columns and cover-stories written for The Hartford Courant’s Sunday magazine, Northeast. A recipient fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and a runner-up in Ebony Magazine’s annual fiction-writing contest, Cindy’s first novel, By the Rivers of Babylon, received critical acclaim when it was published by Strebor/Simon & Schuster in 2007.
Cindy’s mission is to detail the crisis occurring in the lives of urban children. She is a survivor of what she calls “generational genocide.”
Cindy currently lives in Windsor, Connecticut with her husband of thirty-three years, David. She has four grown daughters, two grandchildren, and a passion for street ministry. Cindy is at work on a number of writing projects, among them the sequel to her first novel and a book about black law enforcement.
