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Written in the Waters

A Memoir of History, Home, and Belonging

Author Tara Roberts

Hardcover

$30.00 US

| $41.00 CAN

Disney Publishing Group | National Geographic

On sale Jan 28, 2025 | 400 Pages | 9781426223754

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Nonfiction > Biography & Memoir

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For fans of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, this searing memoir by a National Geographic explorer recounts one woman's epic journey to trace the global slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean—and find her place in the world.

"Tara Roberts is a pioneer and an inspiration. Her work does not so much 'unearth' the past as pull it respectfully out of the depths of the sea. I am deeply moved by this book, and by her journey."—Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

When Tara Roberts first caught sight of a photograph at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History depicting the scuba and underwater archaeology group Diving With a Purpose, it called out to her. Here were Black women and men strapping on masks, fins, and tanks to explore Atlantic Ocean waters along the coastlines of Africa, North America, and Central America, seeking the wrecks of slave ships long lost in time. Inspired, Roberts joined them—and started on a path of discovery more challenging and personal than she could ever have imagined.

In this lush and lyrical memoir, she tells a story of exploration and reckoning that takes her from her home in Washington, D.C., to an exotic array of locales: Thailand and Sri Lanka, Mozambique, South Africa, Senegal, Benin, Costa Rica, and St. Croix. The journey connects her with other divers, scholars, and archaeologists, offering a unique way of understanding the 12.5 million souls carried away from their African homeland to enslavement on other continents. But for Roberts, the journey is also intensely personal. Inspired by the descendants of those who lost their lives during the Middle Passage, she decides to plumb her own family history and life as a Black woman to help make sense of her own identity.

Complex and unflinchingly authentic, this deeply moving narrative heralds an important new voice in literature that will open minds and hearts everywhere.

"Journalist Roberts considers the costs of the global slave trade and its impact on her own family in her engrossing debut. During a 2017 visit to Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Roberts saw a photo of Black scuba divers exploring sunken slave ships. A placard identified the divers as members of the underwater archaeology collective Diving with a Purpose. Moved to join the group in searching “faraway lands right here on Earth” to “tell unknown and untold stories about one of the darkest moments of human history,” Roberts accompanied the divers to shipwrecks off the coasts of South Africa and Costa Rica and slave auction sites in Benin and Togo. As she documents her travels, Roberts sharply reflects on how the transatlantic slave trade led to a “justification for systemic racism,” and catalogs its reverberations within her family tree; in one memorable section, she visits North Carolina and learns that her formerly enslaved great-grandfather took possession of 174 acres of land there after the Civil War. Roberts matches a reporter’s meticulousness with a memoirist’s emotional attunement, delivering a sweeping survey of slavery’s repercussions. It’s a must-read."
—Publisher's Weekly starred review

"Tara Roberts is a pioneer and an inspiration. Her work does not so much 'unearth' the past as pull it respectfully out of the depths of the sea and the shadows of history. I am deeply moved by this book, and by her journey."
—Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love

"Written in the Waters will be forever written on my soul. Tara Roberts is fearless yet vulnerable; adventurous yet grounded. This memoir does the hard, necessary work of generational healing. With her words, she charts a path to spiritual renewal."—Tayari Jones, New York Times best-selling author of An American Marriage

"Tara Roberts' Written in the Waters is a gift—a visceral exploration of the submersed history of the Middle Passage through the eyes of an intrepid, feminist world traveler. In lyrical prose, her riveting account of the history of sunken slave ships—as she negotiates the challenges of midlife—makes this book an indelible read and a significant contribution to Black literary life."
—Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of What Truth Sounds Like

"Tara Roberts is a force of nature and a beautiful storyteller. Written in the Waters is deeply personal and moving: a tale of identity and conviction."
—Robin Roberts, co-anchor, Good Morning America

Tara Roberts is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence who documents shipwrecks that once carried captive Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. Their stories—and the stories of the divers, historians, archaeologists, and communities she meets along the way—became the podcast series Into the Depths, which has been featured in more than 200 media outlets. Tara is a TED Ignite Fellow at the 2025 TED conference. In 2022, Roberts became the first Black female explorer to grace the cover of National Geographic magazine and was named the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year. A former Fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, she has worked as an editor for publications including Essence and CosmoGirl, published her own magazine, and edited several books for girls. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.