Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

The raucous, irreverent, and harrowing story of a transgender woman’s reentry into life on the outside after more than twenty years in prison, over one eventful Fourth of July weekend in Brooklyn–from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.

Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a liquor-store robbery gone wrong in her early twenties, she still went by Dustin Chambers, the name she grew up with in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene–before it gentrified. But within a year of going to prison, she took the name Carlotta and transitioned. Prison authorities rejected this embrace of selfhood, and Carlotta served twenty-two years in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

But in her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and given a bus ticket back to a New York City that has changed as much in the intervening decades as she herself has changed to those who knew her before she was sent away.

Can she reconcile with the son she left behind and reunite with a family reluctant to accept her as Carlotta, all while complying with near-impossible parole restrictions and doing everything in her power to stay out of jail?