My Pisces Heart

An intimate and culturally engaged memoir exploring life as a Black immigrant, tracing Jennifer Neal''s journey from Japan to Chicago, Australia and, finally, Berlin Jennifer Neal mastered the art of reinvention from an early age, with her father''s career uprooting and moving her family across the American South every three or so years. Home was experienced transiently, and she has since spent her adulthood traveling the world, searching for a place of security and acceptance. Weaving together memoir with the historical and present-day political, she interrogates her experience of living in countries across four different continents – what drew her to these places, and what eventually pushed her away. It''s a story of love and self-discovery, culture-shock and art, bureaucracy and racism, and the courage and vulnerability that it takes to immigrate.

Auteur
JENNIFER NEAL is an American Australian author, artist, and occasional standup comedian. Her work has been published in NPR, Playboy, Gay Magazine, The Root, The Erotic Review, The Cut, and many other publications. She is a MacDowell Fellow and Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist. My Pisces Heart is her second book.

Résumé
With heart, humor, and razor-sharp observation, this intimate and incisive memoir traces the journey of a Black, queer woman as she searches the world for a place of security and acceptance to call home

I’ve never seen home as a permanent concept; it is an image crafted from untempered glass that threatens to shatter with lack of care.

Jennifer Neal was born in the United States to a family that moved continuously for their own survival and well-being—from the Great Migration to modern day. Since growing up, she has continued to travel the world across two decades and four continents.

As Jennifer moves from Japan to Chicago, Australia to Germany (where she has settled for now), she weaves her story of immigration with the local Black histories and politics to provide context for her experiences. A vulnerable and sometimes heart-breaking narrative, this book is both a tender tribute to immigrants and their stories as well as a searing indictment of how contemporary discourse endangers them.

This generous personal record is both a crucial examination of how race plays the foundational role of modern-day immigration systems, as well as how racism is the true scourge sweeping across a western world—crossing border walls and threatening global society. The result is an urgent tale of culture-shock and self-discovery, one that sheds light on the courage it takes for anyone to leave one land for another.

An unwavering interrogation of colonialism and policy, love and loss, hypocrisy and resistance, My Pisces Heart demands meaningful conversation on not only the ways in which we live with our histories, but also how they live through us—urging an honest dialogue on why the West continues to grapple with its past, and visualize its future.