Ellen Woods

Warriors in Transition Ellen Woods

This debut memoir is incisive, provocative and astute, unflinching in its revelation of a personal journey rooted in social realities of times past and present. Growing up in Indiana, Woods explores a child's reaction to racial hatred and the Ku Klux Klan with arresting simplicity, as well as her protection of her ill mother, the suicide of a first love, and midlife adoption and parenting. Coming of age during the sixties in Berkeley, her engagement with the Black Panther Party and The Women's Movement revive her childhood dreams of justice and change, yet are unsettling as she encapsulates tough truths. Her life's unfolding delivers to the reader losses and gifts, in full-bodied slice-of-life vignettes that command engagement with all the readers senses. Throughout, Divine guidance appears in the form of old souls, wise teachers and nature.