Lee Stringer lived on the streets from the early eighties until the mid—nineties. He is a former editor and columnist of Street News. His essays and articles have appeared in a variety of other publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Newsday. He lives in Mamaroneck, New York.


bibliography

Author, Sleepaway School

Author, Like Shaking Hands with God

Author, Grand Central Winter

Sleepaway School

"...Stringer's lean prose renders his mother as a resourceful, determined woman who buys her rageful son a punching bag to vent his anger. Only through poetry and art did Springer find outlets for self-expression and a fresh start for the reminder of his youth (until his adult crash with drug addiction). Stringer deftly tells a believable, candid and vivid tale of a person scarred by his past."
-Publishers Weekly


Sleepaway School is Lee Stringer’s recounting of his years at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls—a school for kids at risk—and the events that led up to them.

Like his brother before him, Stringer was surrendered to foster care, shortly after birth, by his unwed and underemployed mother—a common practice for unmarried women in mid-century America. Less common was that she returned six years later to reclaim her children. Rather than leading to a happy ending, though, this is where Stringer’s story begins. The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the “sleepaway school” of the title.

What follows is an intensely personal, American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are absent. We experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a “boy-meets-world” story, the chronicle of one child’s struggle simply to be.

Lee Stringer is the author of the acclaimed Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street (Seven Stories Press, 1998), which has been translated into eighteen languages, and, with Kurt Vonnegut, Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation on Writing (Seven Stories Press, 1999). Stringer has contributed recent writing to Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (2002), Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression (2001), Time Out Book of New York Walks (2000), The Way Home: Ending Homelessness in America (1999), and The Man with the Golden Arm: Fiftieth Anniversary Critical Edition (Seven Stories Press, 1999). He lives in Mamaroneck, New York.ending, though, this is where Stringer’s story begins. The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the “sleepaway school” of the title.

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