God Bless the Child

Sometimes the hell we live in is hidden in plain sight. For six years my mother led my sister and me on a turbulent, erratic homeless journey - from a two bedroom apartment in the Newark, New Jersey housing projects to horrific public shelters and bitter cold alleyways. As a homeless family, it was as if we were invisible, neglected by a system that turned a blind eye and overlooked by strangers who hurried past us. From the age of 10 until I was "emancipated" at 17, my "normal" was a nomadic existence as we crisscrossed 32 cities in 23 states and slept in some 200 homeless shelters - searching for "home." Instead, we found in each place a new ghetto, a new shelter and another level of poverty. Twice in our lives, my mother received a total of $27,000 start-up cash to mass-produce her greeting cards. In both cases, the money was squandered within a matter of weeks as she seesawed between sanity and madness.

God Bless the Child is the painful yet moving account of growing up in shelters from coast to coast and finding the personal resiliency and inner strength to rise above adversity. I will draw back the curtain to reveal the reality of homelessness and its effects that can only be lived in this firsthand account.