Pearl is the newest release from Crimson Kairos LLC
A woman opens a Hope Chest and discovers not only her family's history, but the path toward her own healing.
Pearl | A Novel by Rhonda Welsh
Crimson Kairos LLC | Summer 2026 | $20.00 | ISBN 979-8-9964425-0-8
A woman opens a Hope Chest and finds not just her family’s history, but the path to her own healing.
Pearl is a multigenerational novel tracing four generations of women across roughly 150 years, from a hidden Gullah Geechee island off the Georgia coast through the Great Migration to present-day Detroit. When Eliza flees a violent marriage in 1909, she carries with her an infant daughter and a wooden Hope Chest holding emotional heirlooms. That chest passes down a maternal line marked by abandonment, mental illness, faith, and hard-won self-acceptance. That is until Rae, the youngest woman in the line, opens it in 2012 and reads her way back into a history she never knew she carried.
Written in lyrical, voice-driven prose that moves between standard English and bits of Gullah Geechee dialect, Pearl asks whether healing can happen years after the wound first occurs.
The answer is yes.
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ABOUT RHONDA WELSH
Rhonda Welsh is a Detroit-based writer, poet, educator, and cultural producer whose work has been featured in Time Magazine, the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, the Globe and Mail, and the Michigan Chronicle. She was the only poet invited to perform during the reopening ceremonies of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where her two-week retrospective of African and African American poetry became a highlight of the celebration.
In 2010, Welsh published her debut poetry collection, Red Clay Legacy, which earned praise from legendary poet Nikki Giovanni and a foreword by internationally renowned poet jessica Care moore. A two-time graduate of Wayne State University, she has served as a creative writing instructor with Wayne State’s Math Corps program and as a Writer-in-Residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Pearl is her debut novel.
She lives in metro Detroit, where she continues to write, cultivate herb gardens, DJ House Music, and create spaces where stories can flourish.
WHY RHONDA WELSH WROTE PEARL
“Pearl began with the women in my own family. But it evolved into a larger universal story about the things women carry, the things left unsaid and the things that only time and intentionality help women understand,” says Welsh. "This book is my attempt to trace how a wound travels through generations, and how, even a hundred years later, healing is still possible. I hope it gives readers permission to look back at their own wounds and determine how to move toward healing.”