Writing
Projects
Soni Brown is a Jamaican writer and educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Believer, and AARP Magazine, with a Special Mention in Best American Essays 2023. She teaches creative writing in correctional facilities across Colorado and is currently seeking representation for Wash Belly, a memoir, and Things We Borrow, a short story collection.
Wash Belly: A Memoir of Reconciliation
When Soni Brown's mother developed Alzheimer's dementia, she was left with a question she had spent a lifetime avoiding: what does a daughter owe a parent who was cruel to her? Wash Belly traces Brown's journey from a fractured childhood in Jamaica, shaped by a mother whose behavior may have been early neurological illness masked as meanness, through an adult estrangement, and finally to the years she spent as her mother's primary caregiver in the American West. Braided with research into the possible link between Jamaica's bauxite-rich soil and early-onset Alzheimer's in the Baby Boomer generation, this memoir asks whether the architecture of a family can be rebuilt after the mind that damaged it has emptied out.
Things We Borrow: Stories
Miranda knows exactly who she is and guards it fiercely. Tracey has borrowed someone else's identity so completely she no longer knows where the performance ends. Christopher wakes at 3:47 AM and confesses his grief to an AI because there is no one else left to tell. Bridget signs a contract written in a language that was never hers. Moving between Queens, Brooklyn, Jamaica, and Martinique, Things We Borrow follows Caribbean diaspora characters through the exhausting labor of becoming someone else for survival, and what remains when the performance finally cracks.
