MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM is a blues memoir in verse. With brutal honesty and lyrical prowess, Tony Medina plays the changes in an intimate collection that sticks like a stinging Ali punch and moves like a New York City subway train through the raw, unmitigated terrain of his psyche. Sparked by the sudden death of his father in Harlem, MY OLD MAN WAS ALWAYS ON THE LAM examines his relationship with a long-lost mother who abandoned him at birth, exploring his Bronx projects childhood and his relationship with the paternal grandmother who wrestled him from the clutches of the State and raised him, culminating with a reunion with his terminally ill mother, attempting to fill in the gaps of a precarious past destined to collide with its bare-bones present. In this, his fifth full-length collection, Tony Medina is at his most personal and revelatory.

TONY MEDINA, two-time winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, is the author/editor of sixteen books for adults and young readers, including I and I, Bob Marley, My Old Man Was Always on the Lam, Broke on Ice, An Onion of Wars, and The President Looks Like Me and Other Poems. Medina's poetry, essays and fiction appear in numerous publications. The first Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University, in 2013 Medina was awarded both The Langston Hughes Society Award and the first African Voices Literary Award.