My name's not Susie

By age three, Karen Agnes Fleming had already been neglected by her mother and made a ward of the court; had been in eighteen foster homes where she was given a series of new names; had experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; and had been labeled disobedient, uneducable, and a social misfit. At three and a half, Karen was adopted, her name was changed to Sharon Jean Hamilton, and she started on a long, hard road toward dispelling those early labels. On that road, literacy was the key to transforming her life. She discovered possible worlds - alternatives to her own experiences - by reading about them, moving from L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. She discovered insights into her own world by writing about it. Now in her fifties with a Ph.D. in language and literature from London University, Sharon Jean Hamilton is an English professor. The catalyst for writing My Name's Not Susie was her own classroom. As she observed her nontraditional university students struggling to improve their lives through a literacy-based liberal art education, she was inspired to share her own story.