Blessings and Disasters

A Story of Alabama

By: Alexis Okeowo

Narrated by: Alexis Okeowo, Ariel Blake

From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.

“In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….”

Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the Confederacy—as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with Alabama’s, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.

In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians’ lives, and the state’s lesser-known histories to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company

©2025 Alexis Okeowo (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"In this extraordinary book, Alexis Okeowo examines Alabama as only someone who grew up there could, with care, with criticism, with hope. Here, our much maligned state, the butt of the joke, the example of what not to do, looks much more like what I knew it to be growing up—complex, yes, but also, simply, just like every other state in a union that continues to grapple with its sordid past." —Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom

"I have never wished that a writer was from Mississippi as much as Blessings and Disasters made me wish Alexis Okeowo and I shared a home state. Instead, Alabama, you got one! The majestic ruptures Okeowo finds in Alabama will be written about for decades. Okeowo is showing out in this layered offering, and we are so lucky for it." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

"Outsiders like to define Alabama through oppositions—reality vs. myth, dire poverty vs. reckless wealth, violence vs. natural beauty, and Blacks vs. whites. Alexis Okeowo turns these oppositions into gripping complications, tracking the collective histories and individual lives of Creek Indians, Latinos, whites, African Americans, and West Africans, and combining a reporter’s acuity with a storyteller’s empathy." —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System

"Timely and engrossing—Okeowo's exploration of 'outsiders' in Alabama sheds light on the divided face of our nation and lovingly charts the push and pull of the places we call home." —Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello

Southern Voices Southern Rooms

Why not let the author read this? She was so much better than the narrator who tries to lean into some faux Southern accent and can’t say Mobile properly. A book about Alabama read by some woman who has probably never been here and who prepared her voice and diction by watching movies based on John Grisham novels 👎🏼👎🏼