Poetry. African American Studies. MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM is a blues memoir in verse. With brutal honesty and lyrical prowess, Tony Medina plays the changes in an intimate collection that sticks like a stinging Ali punch and moves like a New York City subway train through the raw, unmitigated terrain of his psyche. Sparked by the sudden death of his father in Harlem, MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM examines his relationship with a long-lost mother who abandoned him at birth, exploring his Bronx projects childhood and his relationship with the paternal grandmother who wrestled him from the clutches of the State and raised him, culminating with a reunion with his terminally ill mother, attempting to fill in the gaps of a precarious past destined to collide with its bare-bones present. In this, his fifth full-length collection, Tony Medina is at his most personal and revelatory.

Author City: HYATTSVILLE, MD USA

Tony Medina, two-time winner of the Paterson Prize, was born in the South Bronx and raised in the Throgs Neck Housing Projects. He served in the United States Army and earned a BA in English at Baruch College, CUNY, on the G.I. Bill. He has taught at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus and Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. The author of several books for adults and young readers, his poetry, fiction, and essays appear in over forty anthologies. Medina, whose most recent books are MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM (NYQ Books, 2011), BROKE ON ICE (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2011), and I and I, Bob Marley (Lee & Low Books, 2009), earned an MA and PhD in English from Binghamton University, SUNY, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University.