Born and raised in Turrell, Arkansas as a young sharecropper, picking and chopping cotton and living under racial tension and poverty out in the country, poet Dorothy Robinson would cling to her mother and niece who was more like a sister to her hoping to escape her childhood life. Wanting a better life, she would later migrate to the Westside of Chicago and get married; thereafter, hoping to escape gangs, crime and poverty to raise her family, mentally-ill brother and sick mother at the same time. Discovering a little town south of Chicago called Hopkins Park, she made the sacrifices of being a wife and a mother of 8 children on welfare to cope and deal with harsh life.