"The God of My Shoes," was alive inside me since I was a child and the episode including the sounds, the contrast in families, and the deep shame that I was responsible. It was the late 1950's when as a small person, I was left to drift along the avenues and streets to find myself. I was in need of shoes for Christmas. The need was not to be met. The episode echoed inside me for years until I finally allowed it to live outside of my sadness. After writing it, I entered it into The Apache County literary contest and it was awarded first place. After that, the local newspaper published it in their commentary page. The catharsis of sharing a demeaning and lost story that stayed with me my whole life was liberating. The collection of stories in, "The God of My Shoes and other short stories and essays," is a compilation of different phases of writing during my career.
About the Author: Eight time award winning author, Kareena Maxwell, was born in Brooklyn, New York, raised on Long Island, and then moved to New York City in 1976 where she lived until 2013 when she moved to Arizona. In her late teens she sang in supper clubs in New York City. After her first son was born she went to Hunter College where she majored in Media Communications. Kareena's first job in journalism was in Holistic Health for Health & Diet Times in NYC as a reporter. She freelanced for many publications, has published short stories, and poetry, and was Associate Editor for The Upper Eastside Informer, and had two columns at the Examiner, "The Apache County Neighborhoods Examiner," and "The Upper Eastside Examiner." Part of her career was as an Operation's Supervisor at a women's homeless shelter in NYC and she documented that experience in her first published book, "Incidents from a Shelter: The Season of the Larva." Her next book was "The Sex Life of the Everyday Woman," then, "Stanley," (a novel about American Anthropologist, Stanley Ann Dunham), and recently the trilogy, "The Birds of Concho." Books one and two, "Finding Juanito," and "Meth Moon: To Hell & Back," are published. "The Year of the Shaman," will be published before the end of 2017. http: //greenleafpublishers.com/FindingJuanito.htm. Maxwell's memoir, "The Granny Chronicles: Learning to Speak Leopard," is the award winning story that was the first to be published under her independent publishing company, Threshold Publishing. Kareena is a journalist with a poet's heart and embraces the journey of writing about her mother's dementia with both an objective and subjective point of view. She can be reached at kareenamaxwell@aol.com