Difficult Fruit grapples with personal experience – with naming and claiming the 'fruits' of a specific journey into womanhood.

This journey is one which includes coming to terms with violence and loss, celebrating love and connection, and standing witness in the world that shaped that journey. It is a collection of poems about coming into self-knowledge – of fighting for and winning personhood as a woman in the world.

Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. Her writing has been awarded the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, and other awards, and her poems have been published in Black Arts Quarterly and The Caribbean Writer among other journals. She is co-editor of the anthology From the Heart of Brooklyn (Vivisphere, 9781587761423), and author of Dawn in the Kaatskills (Longshore Press, 9780000100757), a chapbook.