Montgomery, Alabama, she grew up between the South and Los Angeles before moving to New York City to attend Barnard College. She earned a master’s in secondary English education from Stanford University and taught high school English for six years. Eckstine lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their cats. Junie is her debut novel.
At Electric Lit "seven works of speculative fiction [that] are a few of my favorite examples of the genre’s limitless possibilities to examine power, race, and oppression." One title on the list:
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn WardRead about the other entries on Eckstine's list.
Part road trip, part intergenerational family story, Sing Unburied Sing follows mother-and-son Leonie and Jojo as they travel to pick up Jojo’s father from Parchman Prison in Mississippi. Like most great ghost stories, the haunting has little to do with the undead spirits. Instead of focusing on supernatural ghosts, the novel explores how the lasting effects of systemic racial and class violence haunt people’s lives.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is among Joel H. Morris's seven novels involving literal and metaphorical ghost children, Sarah Bernstein's top ten grudge holders in fiction, James Yorkston's top ten road novels, Stacey Swann's seven novels about very dysfunctional families, Una Mannion’s top ten books about children fending for themselves, Sahar Mustafah's seven novels about grieving a family member and LitHub's ten books we'll be reading in ten years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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