Joy Keys chats with Author Dawn Turner about Three Girls from Bronzeville

DAWN TURNER is an award-winning journalist and novelist. A former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPR’s Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She has covered national presidential conventions, as well as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election and inauguration. Turner has been a regular commentator for several national and international news programs, and has reported from around the world in countries such as Australia, China, France, and Ghana. She spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Turner is the author of two novels, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven and An Eighth of August. In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The animating question at the center of Dawn Turner’s profound, gorgeously written, and resonant memoirTHREE GIRLS FROM BRONZEVILLE  is: when did we lose them? Them being the author’s sister, Kim,and her best friend, Debra. One dead by 25, the other imprisoned for decades after killing a man. Why did they fall behind while another graduated college and became an award-winning journalist? Why was Dawn given grace to learn from her mistakes while Debra and Kim never recovered? Three Girls from Bronzeville is Dawn’s attempt to find answers.