The Strength From Within
Windows To My Soul

This is an inspirational story of an inner city boy’s journey to manhood, from the war zone projects of East New York Brooklyn during the crack epidemic of the 1980’s. This young phoenix used education to rise from the violence and despair that surrounded him by embodying the American dream.
The Strength From Within Windows to My Soul chronicles the journeys of a young man and his mother respectively covering five decades of courage, resilience, trauma and triumph. This non-fictional memoir details the northern migration of a twenty-year-old young woman estranged from her family who bravely takes a pilgrimage to New York City from Alabama.
In hopes of a new life in New York she falls in and out of love. She later gives birth to three sons who have three different fathers and three different coming of age experiences. The two eldest brothers get caught in a web of crime, violence and hopelessness. The youngest son Michael uses all that he has to avoid the street life and break the family cycle.
Looking out of his eleventh floor project window Michael is able to imagine the life that he always wanted. That window served as a place of refuge perched high above the shootings, drug pedaling, and poverty that lingered below on the concrete surface and park benches.
The Strength From Within Windows to My Soul chronicles the journeys of a young man and his mother respectively covering five decades of courage, resilience, trauma and triumph. This non-fictional memoir details the northern migration of a twenty-year-old young woman estranged from her family who bravely takes a pilgrimage to New York City from Alabama.
In hopes of a new life in New York she falls in and out of love. She later gives birth to three sons who have three different fathers and three different coming of age experiences. The two eldest brothers get caught in a web of crime, violence and hopelessness. The youngest son Michael uses all that he has to avoid the street life and break the family cycle.
Looking out of his eleventh floor project window Michael is able to imagine the life that he always wanted. That window served as a place of refuge perched high above the shootings, drug pedaling, and poverty that lingered below on the concrete surface and park benches.

Creating hip-hop lyrics to illustrate his thoughts and make sense of his harsh realities Michael was able to normalize an abnormal situation. Accepted to a prestigious Catholic High School he finally feels that he found a way out of the ghetto. Michael soon realizes that that life was not as easy as he imagined gazing out of that apartment window.
The Strength From Within is complete at 60,000 words, and is the first in a planned series to be followed by a workbook entitled: Windows to Your Soul.