Leesa Cross-Smith is a homemaker and has been a finalist for both the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. She is the author of Every Kiss A War (Mojave River Press, 2014) and the forthcoming novel Whiskey & Ribbons (Hub City Press, March 2018). Her work has appeared in Oxford American and Best Small Fictions, among many others. She is the founder/editor of WhiskeyPaper and lives and writes in Kentucky.
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren't as safe.