Francisco

Alison Mills Newman started her career as the first African American teenage actress on a television series (Julia). As a musician and vocalist she has performed with Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Weather Report, and Taj Mahal. She is an award-winning film director and the author of the novel Maggie 3. Mills Newman is the president of Keep the Faith Film Ministries, a chaplain at Fulton County Jail, and has five beautiful children with the late Francisco Toscono Newman, as well as ten grandchildren. Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and lives in New York.

"Mills Newman has done the rare thing: written with beauty, power, and purity about a woman."