Featured Book: From Whence We Come, by Maurice W. Dorsey
Meet the author! Author Maurice W. Dorsey will be at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, May 27 (Baltimore). See details here.
I met author Maurice W. Dorsey at the Rainbow Book Fair two years ago. His first book, Businessman First, was the masterful telling of the life of Henry G. Parks. Jr., an African American businessman and entrepreneur. The biography soon became a QBR Wheatley Book Award Finalist.
With the recent release of From Whence We Come, author Dorsey has returned in full force with the story of Seymour Rose, an African American man who is gay and whose life has taught him that coming to terms with family, love, loss, and one’s own identity, can come at high cost.
Seymour Rose is an African American man who is gay. He was born to a father who is Catholic and accepts his son unconditionally and a mother who is born Methodist and is homophobic but most of all, she tells her son throughout his life that she never wanted to have him.
Seymour reflects on three generations of his family history and often tells family stories to make sense of his years of emotional insecurity and feelings of being unloved and unwanted.
His mother is Estelle. She is a strong African American woman whose mother died when she was ten years old. Her father forced her to be surrogate wife and mother to her younger sister and brother. When the Great Depression of the late 1920s occurred and wiped out the familys finances, they were forced into a life of destitution. Never having enough money, she lived and dreamed of growing up and having a job and money of her own …
… At the end of her life, Estelle reveals to Seymour her years of malcontent with her son, and he comes to terms with his mother and his family history. This book is fictitious but based on a true story.
Read the book’s full description at Amazon
Maurice W. Dorsey graduated the only African American in his class at the Bel Air High School, Bel Air Maryland in 1965. He earned a bachelor’s of science degree in Home Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1970; then earned a masters’ degree of Liberal Arts from the Johns Hopkins University in 1975; and earned a second master’ degree of Education from Loyola University of Maryland in 1976. He returned to the University of Maryland to earn a PhD. in Education in 1985. He has worked in both the public and private sectors finding his career in secondary education, higher education, and government. He retired from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture in 2012. Businessman First: Remembering Henry G. Parks, Jr. 1916 to 1989 Capturing the Life of a Businessman who was African American a biography is his first book. He resides in Washington, DC.