Michelle Kuo taught English at an alternative school in the Arkansas Delta for two years. After teaching, she attended Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and worked at a nonprofit for undocumented immigrants in Oakland, California, on a Skadden Fellowship, with a focus on tenants’ and workers’ rights. She also clerked for a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. Currently she teaches courses on race, law, and society at the American University of Paris.

A memoir of race, inequality and the power of literature told through the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student who was jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta.