Coming in 2025 from Blackwater Press

Finalist for the 2021 River Teeth nonfiction book prize

***Available for preorder now!***

If Louisa May Alcott had imagined a fifth March sister, she might have been a lot like activist and educator Martha Schofield (1839–1916): passionate about equality, determined to break free from the restrictions of nineteenth-century society, yearning equally for both purpose and love.

Crosshatch: Martha Schofield, the Forgotten Feminist (1839–1916), a 70,000-word biography in essays, introduces readers to Schofield, who became famous teaching free people in post–Civil War South Carolina. Weaving together research, personal experience, and cultural criticism, CROSSHATCH evokes the essayistic prose of Jenn Shapland, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson. It will appeal to readers looking for untold stories of women, those coming to terms with the intertwined histories of race and gender, and those seeking a greater understanding of the relationship between the past and the present.

The narrative follows Schofield from the Underground Railroad outposts of southeastern Pennsylvania to war-ravaged South Carolina. As an abolitionist, a women’s suffragist, and a white teacher of Black students, she spent a lifetime attempting to develop (however imperfectly) an antiracist feminist vision. Schofield’s letters and diaries, which I spent five years poring over and analyzing, also provide unparalleled access to the intimate details of her personal life: her love affairs with both women and men, her rocky mental and physical health, her thoughts as she watched wounded soldiers die after the Battle of Gettysburg or stared down Ku Klux Klan members during Reconstruction. Interspersed throughout the narrative are sections on what I learned from Schofield about my own place in history as a white woman and a feminist—lessons that deeply affected my understanding of the intersections of race and gender in our own time—and about the urgency of listening to women’s voices, then and now.

Advance Praise for Crosshatch:

What makes, of our lives, a story? What stories are ours to write? These questions pulse across the pages of Crosshatch, a book of history and memoir, research and quest—a book, in other words, of gleaming mirrors. In the able hands of historian Christina Larocco, the feminist Martha Schofield emerges as a complex character, and also a complicated one—a perfect foil for our deeply complicated times and a brilliant companion for Larocco’s own most elegant mind.

 —Beth Kephart

My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera

Crosshatch is a thoughtful blend of biography and personal essay, and a journey of revisiting well-known US history—this time through the eyes of a woman. Historian Christina Larocco's care for the stories of women, often buried and ignored, is obvious in her treatment of Martha Schofield. Bringing to life the story of this lesser-known feminist in parallel to examining her own personal history, Christina interrogates how the past and present affect each other. Hers is a precise, sharp, and witty voice illuminating that history is made while we live out our everyday lives.

—Janna Marlies Maron

Nonfiction Book Coach, Editor & Publisher of Under the Gum Tree