Nowhere Girl

January 1, 2021

Host of the popular advice column "�Hola Papi!" on Substack, Brammer offers a memoir-in-essays, tracking what it's like to grow up as a queer, mixed-race Chicano kid in America's heartlands (75,000-copy first printing). In The Profession, originally scheduled for fall 2020 and written with Turnaround coauthor Knobler, Bratton tracks a career that led to his being police commissioner in New York City. Burns proclaims Where You Are Is Not Who You Are, sharing where she's been and what she's learned as the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company (75,000-copy first printing). Former teen model Diamond (Naked Rome) reveals a childhood both wacky and cliff-hanging in Nowhere Girl; on the run with an outlaw family, she lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities, by age nine (50,000-copy first printing). Twitter-famous Henderson offers The Ugly Cry to tell us about being raised Black in a mostly white community by tough grandparents after her mother abandoned her. Today show news anchor Melvin uses Pops to explore issues of race and fatherhood while recalling his own dad (100,000-copy first printing). Founder of Chicago's Dreamcatcher Foundation, which assists young people in disadvantaged areas, Myers-Powell recalls a childhood fractured by her mother's death and a life of pimps and parties before finally Leaving Breezy Street (75,000-copy first printing). Growing up scary smart if poor and emotionally unsupported, James Edward Plummer renamed himself Hakeem Muata Oluseyi to honor his African heritage and now leads A Quantum Life as a NASA physicist. In House of Sticks, Tran recalls leaving Vietnam as a toddler in 1993 and growing up in Queens, helping her mom as a manicurist and eventually graduating from Columbia (100,000-copy first printing). In As a Woman, Williams, a celebrated speaker on gender equity and LGTBQ+ issues, describes the decision to transition from male to female as a 60-year-old husband, father, and pastor (60,000-copy first printing).

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May 1, 2021
Diamond has always been caught between the Con Man and the Cop. Hers was a life lived on the lam, either eluding the henchmen hired by her maternal grandfather to return her family to his iron-fisted control in Luxembourg, or evading Interpol officers out to arrest her father for myriad financial schemes. The family was always prepared for the middle-of-the-night knock on the door that would send them scrambling for their stash of fake passports, with their belongings either crammed into suitcases or stashed in storage lockers around the globe. As a result, Diamond learned how to spot a surveillance tail before she could recite her ABCs. Eventually, penniless and homeless, she parlayed her emaciated body and bruised beauty into a career as a teen model, only to have the accumulated stress of such an uncertain existence manifest in a life-threatening illness that would force her to reconcile with one of the two men responsible for her condition. The survivor of extreme psychological and physical abuse, Diamond recounts her lifelong struggle to discover her true self in a beyond-harrowing memoir. Within the autobiographical subset of children-overcoming-adversity that was defined by Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle (2005) and Tara Westover's Educated (2018), Diamond's tale might just be the most mind-blowing of them all.

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