Skinfolk: A Memoir

"Matthew Pratt Guterl's Skinfolk explores a question we all face: What makes us kin? This fascinating story of his family's utopian experiment teaches us that it takes more than blood to bind us together. Guterl walks along fraught lines of race, language, color, and history with compassion and grace. In some moments gripping and at others intimately at ease, Skinfolk opens a door to our dreams of what the idea of family might make possible." --Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard "An achingly moving memoir. . . . Matthew Pratt Guterl lays his scholar's eye over a complex narrative exploring the joys and limitations of love, family, and adoption." --Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero " Skinfolk lays bare one family's dramatic attempt to create a kind of racial reckoning by offering up their own household as a model for integration and diversity. With unflinching eyes, Matthew Pratt Guterl examines his family experiment with an academic's precision, detailing the moments of transcendence, awkwardness, and longing. A fascinating read." --Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land "Matthew Pratt Guterl chronicles the struggle to build a family in the aftermath of war and social strife with grace and vulnerability. . . . The story of this family is unforgettable in its embrace of the personal and the political. The notion of belonging is drawn and redrawn across these pages with honesty and abiding affection. A powerful read." --Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide "I've long admired Matthew Pratt Guterl's histories of race and racism in America, and in this moving, beautifully written memoir, he shows us how those same histories shape our most intimate attachments." --Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit