Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Crooked Road Straight: The Awakening of AIDS Activist Linda Jordan is the phenomenal, personal journey of how Linda Carole Jordan, a woman whose life was a struggle just to survive, became a messenger of hope for families coping with AIDS.    Linda emerged in the 1990s as an advocate who believed that people like her, those who lived day by day with the AIDS pandemic, were under-represented in the nation’s public health prevention campaigns. This book takes the reader down the path taken by Linda, a second-generation welfare recipient and recovering heroin addict, over five harrowing decades in Hartford, Conn., one of America’s poorest cities.   Based on 12 years of interviews by award-winning reporter Tina A. Brown, the book is a riveting narrative of Linda’s colorful yet troubled life. This work of creative non-fiction is written with the immediacy of a novel, weaving together stories told by Linda and her family; the author’s observations; and family records provided by the Connecticut Department of Children’s and Families.   Crooked Road Straight puts a human face to the statistics of a community that continues to cope with the AIDS virus in secrecy. African-American women like Linda accounted for 67 percent of the estimated AIDS cases in 2004, but only 13 percent of the female population in the U.S., according to The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.   Linda’s recovery began in 1989 after she threatened suicide on the steps of the BlueHillsTreatment Center in Hartford. She was homeless, HIV positive and had lost custody of her three youngest daughters to foster care.   Treatment and counseling forced Linda to confront her faded memories of being sexually assaulted as a toddler; raped at age 10 by her childhood boyfriend, Alvin; and mainlining heroin at age 18. She committed to changing her life at a time when the welfare system in Connecticut, a financial crutch for much of her life, was drying up.   Rather than be defeated, Linda found God and reversed the course of her life. She recovered from her addiction, regained custody of her children and lived for 21 years without medication.   In 1994, Linda was one of the first African-American women in the U.S. to pose for AIDS prevention posters with her husband and children. Nearly 20,000AIDS prevention posters and billboards produced by the Concerned Citizens for Humanity, a non-profit organization in Hartford, continue to circulate around the globe.       Aspects of Linda Jordan’s life story were told in 1996 in a newspaper account by Tina A. Brown in The Hartford Courant, and a decade later when Linda died. Her photographs were featured in Life Magazine, and she was recognized as a speaker at the 1994 International AIDS Convention in Yokohama, Japan.   Linda overcame unbearable trials to become a pioneering force in the AIDS community. She closed her eyes for the last time about sunrise on May 1, 2006, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Websites: www.crookedroadstraight.com and www.tabbrownpublishing.com                        

Tina has been a member of several award-winning writing teams, including: the Hartford Courant’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Connecticut lottery shootings (www.courant.com); the 2007 Casey Medal award winners for exemplary reporting on children and families (www.casey.umd.edu); and the 2006 Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Excellence award for its coverage of lesbian families (www.nlgia.org). She has also served on teams that won the 2004 Sigma Delta Chi National Public Service award in Magazine Journalism, and The Stephen A. Collins Public Service award in 2004 for “Complicity: How Connecticut Chained Itself to Slavery,” an 80-page special issue of Northeast.

In 2002, Tina won acclaim from the Connecticut Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for “Takira,’’ the Northeast magazine story about a 7-year-old who was shot in the face by a drug dealer’s bullet. She won first-place in 2002 for spot news from The New England Associated Press News Executives for the story “This is Takira.” Additionally, she was among a team of reporters in 1999 awarded the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s “Let’s Do it Better,’’ citation for an 18-month exploration into the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old African-American robbery suspect by a white police officer in Hartford.