“In American Bloodlines, Sonya Lea reveals the ways that whiteness harms through
an exhaustive, often vulnerable, excavation of her privilege and learned racism. She
illustrates the hatred animated in her ancestry with a courageous sobriety that emerges
through countless interviews, poignant recollections, and meticulous research. The
result is an engaging blueprint for the repair of self and one’s community from an
underexplored perspective. American Bloodlines is required reading for all those still
uncertain about the murderous outcomes of white supremacy and for all those who
yearn to heal.”
-  Irvin Weathersby Jr., author of In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy
in Art and Public Space

“In American Bloodlines, Sonya Lea confronts America’s history of racial terror and
the enduring legacy of lynch culture. This searing and necessary book serves as an
essential act of reckoning and remembrance, urging us to face the difficult truths that
shape our past, present, and future with clarity and humility.”
 —Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings, Essays on Justice for the Twenty-First Century

“Sonya Lea’s unflinching account of complicity in America’s racial violence sets an
example at a crucial time when this country—and, indeed, the rest of the world—must
contemplate our acquiescence and our silences in the face of genocidal hate.”
— Anna Badkhen, author of Bright Unbearable Reality

In tracing her own and a nation’s lines of blood, Sonya Lea takes readers on an
intellectual and moral odyssey. With compelling prose, American Bloodlines clears a
path homeward that is lit with loyalty and belonging.
—Emily Bingham, My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song

“Sonya Lea masterfully models how to engage in the project of reconciliation, truth
telling and grace that is so urgently needed in this moment”
—Garrett Bucks, The Right Kind of White & The Barnraisers Project

”Deeply personal and rigorously researched, American Bloodlines is both an
interrogation of Sonya Lea’s own whiteness and a lighthouse for others who may be
nervous about taking on the same work...it reads effortlessly, like an intellectual and
moral adventure story.”
—Kristi Coulter, author of Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“American Bloodlines is about more than Lea’s ancestors and the past. It is a deep
exploration of lynching culture, and an intentional examination of the role white
womanhood still plays in upholding racist structures that endanger the lives of Black
people and other people of color.”
—E. Gale Greenlee, former teacher-scholar in residence at the bell hooks center, Berea College

“Sonya Lea has given us a master class in weaving research with family narrative.
Though American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture is a call to radical
action, it is also a call to radical love. The book itself is an act of compassion.”
—Kelly Sundberg, The Answer Is in the Wound

“Sonya Lea has written a courageous, insightful, necessary book—part memoir, part
American (and Canadian) history, part reflection on the nature of racism and on what
is involved in the work of bringing it to an end.”
—Priscilla Long, Founding and Consulting Editor of HistoryLink.org, and Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of
America’s Bloody Coal Industry.

“In this act of reckoning, this necessary labor, Sonya Lea faces violence directly—in all
its bloody forms. Lea’s admirable flow of research does not leave anyone she’s
affiliated with, whether by blood or heritage, to escape the attention of a fine-toothed,
anti-racist comb.”
—Davis Shoulders, editor of Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia