The Steps We Take

Ellen Ann Fentress is a journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster. She produced and directed Eyes on Mississippi, a 2016 documentary on iconic civil rights journalist Wilson F. Minor that has screened at universities and institutions across the country. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, storySouth, and New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where she was a reporter.

In The Steps We Take, Fentress holds a mirror to the archetype (or stereotype) of the helpful, ever-cheerful, and often self-deceiving southern white woman. What results is a meaningful examination of whiteness and womanhood, privilege and charity, all baked into the author's story of personal transformation." - Lauren Rhoades, host of Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Mississippi Arts Hour "Fentress's book is an attempt not only to tell her story but to offer a way forward from the blindness and consequent harm caused by the easy acceptance of inequality in American society. Always the hope is that exposure to such earnest stories will persuade others toward the type of self-reflection and change in individual attitudes and behaviors that will move the needle on America's racial and gender issues in positive directions." - Paulette Boudreaux, author of Mulberry: A Novel "In this arresting and clear-eyed memoir of help offered and help denied, Ellen Ann Fentress lays bare the southern systems that pollute our best impulses: Christian coercion, entrenched racial hierarchies, and unrelenting female self-sacrifice. While the message is stark and at times heartbreaking, the messenger is Fentress's confessional, warm, and often hilarious prose. Reading The Steps We Take, I felt both exposed and embraced, as after any honest conversation with a true friend." - Katy Simpson Smith, author of The Everlasting: A Novel and The Weeds: A Novel