rucial, intimate, high, deep, it has the undeniable shine of a brilliant being finding her way in a world that cannot handle her shine." cin salach, author of When I Am Yes

Working on Me chronicles the dysfunction and lore of a Black Russian Jewish interracial family on the far south side of Chicago, and the resulting trajectory of its prodigal child: multifaceted, multidisciplinary artist, performer, and sexual and domestic violence survivor Nikki Patin.

A meditation on the biomythography genre defined by Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Harjo, Working on Me lyrically dances in and out of different voices and perspectives in order to get to something like the truth. Patin's prowess as a poet and a songwriter is reflected in prose that is brutal, beaut

Working on Me is about what it means to work on oneself to heal and break patterns of harm and violence and what makes the healing necessary in the first place: all the forces beyond our control that work on us.