Zelda Lockhart presents TRINITY at Flyleaf Books

The Hurston-Wright Award Finalist makes her long-awaited return with this electrifying saga—as moving and indelible as The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Turner House, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois—that explores three generations of a family trying to overcome trials and trauma and free themselves from the darkness of the past.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity. These two generations of men are haunted by the Mother-Spirit who did not survive enslavement’s post-traumatic stress violence. Trinity is the riveting story of the daughter-spirit born to stitch love back into the scattered wombs of her Black mothers and call love back into the fishing blues songs of her Black male kin. Lottie Rebecca Lee is the Divine spirited daughter born to set everything back up right again, in this daringly original novel.

Zelda Lockhart is Director at Her Story Garden Studios: Inspiring Black Women to Self-Define, Heal, and Liberate Through Our Stories & Nature. Lockhart holds a PhD in Expressive Art Therapies, an MA in Literature, and a certificate in film from the New York Film Academy. Her books include HarperCollins 2023 release Trinity (a novel), HarperCollins 2021 release Mama Bear: One Black Mother’s Fight for Her Child’s Life and Her Own by Shirley Smith with Zelda Lockhart, Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief by Doris Payne with Zelda Lockhart, and The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript: Turning Life’s Wounds into the Gift of Literary Fiction, Memoir, or Poetry. Her other novels are Fifth Born, a Barnes & Noble Discovery selection and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award finalist, Cold Running Creek, a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Fiction Awardee, and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle, 2011 Lambda Literary Award finalist.