Books
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What We Carry, What We Leave Behind – completed memoir manuscript
What We Carry, What We Leave Behind is a lyric memoir about growing up in the rural South inside a family shaped by silence, violence, faith, and inheritance—and the long work of reclaiming a self that was never fully allowed to form.
Set against a backdrop of small-town Alabama, the book traces a childhood marked by domestic violence, alcoholism, and unspoken rules about what could be named and what had to be endured. Guns, churches, kitchens, and back roads recur as sites of both intimacy and threat. As the narrator comes of age, survival depends not only on staying safe, but on learning how to disappear—how to become the good daughter, the overachiever, the funny one, the one who doesn’t need anything.
Threaded through these experiences is a quiet, complicated queerness—felt long before it could be spoken, shaped by Southern Baptist doctrine and the understanding that truth carries consequences. The memoir follows the author from childhood through adulthood as she reckons with intergenerational trauma, the cost of silence, and the ways families rewrite violence as love in order to survive themselves.
Told in braided vignettes and lyrical prose, What We Carry, What We Leave Behind resists easy redemption. Instead, it asks what healing actually requires: not forgiveness or forgetting but naming. The book ultimately centers on reclamation—of memory, voice, and self—offering a portrait of life beyond survival.
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Tuscaloosa to Tupelo, a collection of poetry
Tuscaloosa to Tupelo is a collection of poems shaped by Southern landscapes, family history, grief, and longing. Through lyric intensity and emotional precision, the collection explores the uneasy beauty of home and the ways memory, love, and loss continue to echo across place and time.
"Tuscaloosa to Tupelo is a fine first book of sophisticated lyricism, set in the backroads, farmyards, and swimming holes of Arley, Alabama, and haunted by its family ghosts. Even in her apparently effortless villanelles and sestinas, Sampley remains true to the speech and the heart of the place."
—John Balaban
"Jessica Sampley knows how to put words together so they become invisible, and rural Alabama rises everywhere. These are poems to, for and about others. The senses are the key. Love is the door. Rich in narrative pleasures, informed by a lyric sensibility and guided by verbal mastery, Sampley’s Tuscaloosa to Tupelo offers voices from the lost past and disappearing present to carry us into the timeless world of now."
—Tom Lisk
Click the book cover to purchase a copy on Main Street Rag Publishers.
