Bessie Stringfield: Tales of the Talented Tenth, no. 2 Ready for school Ashley Hope Perez has taken Fiction African American & Black Historical Sagas Historical Ashley Hope Perez has taken the explosion as her backdrop and imagined a diverse cast of characters whose broken lives are utterly captivating and tragically entangled with the school and the explosion Tressie McMillan Cottom—award winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically “thick”: deemed “thick where I should have been thin Now imagine she is black and is journeying across the country in the pre Civil Rights era of the 1930s and ’40s the woman known today as The Motorcycle Queen of Miami and the first black woman to be inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association Hall of Fame and the Harley Davidson Hall of Fame