Everybody Come Alive: A Memoir in Essays (HC) (2023)

"To give you some idea of the kind of stuff I'm made of, and the backbone from which I emerged and now stand, here's a story..."

In her debut book, Everybody Come Alive, Marcie Alvis Walker invites offers readers a deeply intimate and illuminating memoir comprising lyrical essays and remembrances of being a curious child of the seventies and eighties, raised under the critical and watchful eye of Jim Crow matriarchs who struggled to integrate their lives and remain whole.

Her writing is nostalgic but unflinching, candid yet tender. While swimming in rivers of racial trauma and racial reckoning, Alvis Walker explores her earliest memories of abandonment and erasure, of her mother's mental illness and incarceration, and of her ongoing struggles with perfectionism and body dysmorphia in hopes of leaving a healed and whole legacy for her own child. Everybody Come Alive is an invitation to be vulnerable along with her as she unravels all the beauty and terror of God, race, and gender's imprint on her life.

This is a coming-of-age journey touching on the bittersweet pain and joy of what it takes to become a person who fully embraces being Black, being a woman, and being holy in America. Alvis Walker's unforgettable writing challenges readers to not only see and hold her story as being fully human, but also to see and hold their own stories too.