A Child Is a Poem You Learn By Heart: A Memoir in Verse

Awarded Third Place by the NATIONAL Federation of Press Women Communications Contest, 2021 for Non-fiction for Adult Readers, Autobiography or Memoir

Awarded FIRST PLACE by Virginia Professional Communicators, 2021, for Non-fiction for adult readers, Memoir-.

South Carolina, 1940s. A farmer's daughter marries her father's hired hand and the two of them have Paulette, a child who will grow up on her own. In an era when divorce was rare, Paulette's mother was married three times and struggled to care for her daughter, working at a drugstore by day and a bar by night. Paulette spent nights alone in their apartment leafing through her mother's True Confessions magazines and listening to 78 rpm records, dancing with her shadow.In this collection of expressive free verse, Whitehurst shares the memories of her upbringing. When the author was a toddler, her mother left her in the home of strangers for four years and removed her from that home at age six bringing her into a world of poverty and poor choices. This is the true story of her mother's trial-and-error approach to parenting, her choices, and the ways they affected her daughter. When her mother married for the third time, security and a better life seemed to be within reach, but Whitehurst realized that her mother viewed her as an obstacle to happiness. The author lived a childhood of loneliness and emotional abuse until she found her voice and the road to her future as an influential, award-winning teacher. When she was sixteen, she had never read a book cover to cover until her English teacher encouraged her with a few kind words. Another English teacher encouraged her to write when she was seventeen and her history teacher encouraged her to think for herself and to speak her mind. Her powerful, honest, yet loving memoir demonstrates the power of a teacher's words and their effect on a young life.