In 2015, Sean Enfield was recently out of college and teaching English at a predominantly Muslim middle school in North Texas. His experiences during the year that followed—including witnessing Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and the Black Lives Matter protests in Dallas—are the subject of Enfield’s debut essay collection, (Split/Lip Press, December 2023). In the book, Enfield locates his teaching, his family, and his own artistic passions within the broader context of America’s racial politics and notions of success. With humor, fury, and compassion, Enfield asks is a book that I think my younger self could have used as he reluctantly became an educator for the first time,” says Enfield. “I think it offers some meaningful commiseration while keeping its eyes forward, chin tilted upward.”
