Tombolo Books is honored to welcome Dr.
Marcia E. Herman-Giddens to the bookstore to share her debut memoir,
Unloose My Heart: Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family Tree, with our readers.
Unloose My Heart is a deeply personal memoir that unearths a family history of racism, slaveholding, and trauma as well as love and sparks of delight. With heartbreak, moments of grace, and an enduring sense of love, this memoir shines a light in the darkness and provides a model for a heartfelt reckoning with American history.
Herman-Giddens will be in conversation with local author of
Making of A Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade,
Dr. Charles Dew. 
Marcia Edwina Herman-Giddens, born in Washington, DC, moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1946 when the first bombings of African American establishments had begun. As Marcia grew up, she was profoundly affected by her exposure to the wrongs of Jim Crow.
Dr. Herman-Giddens attended St. John’s College, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina (MPH, 1985, and DrPH, 1994). After receiving her Physician Associate degree from Duke University Medical Center in 1978 (BHS, Magna Cum Laude, 1978), she practiced pediatrics for 16 years, serving on the faculty there and in the Department of Community and Family Medicine. She directed Duke’s Child Protection Team for many years, leading it to national recognition both for its contribution to research as well as its service to children. She served on or chaired numerous committees, advisory boards, and task forces. She later taught child abuse and child development at the UNC School of Public Health. Her research on puberty and child abuse, and child abuse fatalities has been published in numerous journals, books, and monographs,
More recently, Herman-Giddens turned her research and writing skills to her family ancestral history. Her debut book, Unloose My Heart: A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family Tree, interweaves her experiences in Birmingham’s perilous apartheid world with an examination and acknowledgement of her maternal ancestors’ slaveholding history.
She writes and gardens beside a canopy of trees outside her office window, and cherishes her large family, which now includes two great-grandchildren.
Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Williams College. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, he attended North Ward Elementary School and Mirror Lake Junior High School before graduating magna cum laude from Woodberry Forest School in Virginia in 1954 and summa cum laude with Honors in History from Williams College in 1958; he received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under C. Vann Woodward, in 1964. He taught at Wayne State University, Louisiana State University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the University of Virginia before returning to teach at Williams in 1977. Professor Dew retired in 2020 following forty-three years as a member of the Williams faculty. His teaching there focused on the American South, the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the institution of slavery. His most recent book is The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade. Earlier scholarship includes: Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge; Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War; and Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Ironworks. Ironmaker to the Confederacy and Apostles of Disunion both received the Fletcher Pratt Award, given by the Civil War Roundtable of New York for the best non-fiction book on the Civil War in its year of publication; Bond of Iron received the 1995 Elliot Rudwick Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the experience of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States and was also named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.
