Mab Segrest

Headshot of Mab Segrest
The arc of Mab Segrest’s work spans forty years and profound cultural shifts, the resolution of which still hangs in perilous balance. In 1984, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote about Mab Segrest’s first book, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, proclaiming, “Mab Segrest is of a younger generation than I, another kind of family. But her essays speak to the whispers in my bones, and they both remind and instruct me. To understand this country, we need to know the American South from the perspective of those who, like Margaret Walker, like Mab Segrest, have lived real lives there all along.” In 2020, Segrest is back with a reissue of her classic anti-racist text Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South and an epic new volume, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry from Georgia’s Milledgeville Asylum. This in-depth asylum study is already being hailed as a landmark of scholarship, a “profoundly great book,” and a “gripping” and “compelling” and “monumental” narrative.