Other Press Publishes 'The Confessions of Matthew Strong' by Alumnus Ousmane K. Power-Greene '21

The Confessions of Matthew Strong, a work of historical fiction by alumnus Ousmane K. Power-Greene ’21, is out next week from Other Press. 

By
Jessie Shohfi
October 19, 2022

The Confessions of Matthew Strong, a work of historical fiction by alumnus Ousmane K. Power-Greene ’21, is out next week from Other Press. 

This novel is the debut work of fiction from Power-Greene, who is also the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement (NYU Press, 2014).

Power-Greene’s novel follows Allie Greene, a Black philosophy professor, in the days after she learns of the disappearance of one of her graduate students, a girl named Cynthia Wade. At a dinner celebrating Allie’s professional achievements, she meets the disturbing and racist Matthew Strong, who tells Allie she is “the smartest one of [her] kind.” Allie has the clues and the brains to connect Cynthia’s disappearance to a slew of other missing young Black women, but as she’s following up on these leads, she puts herself in the crosshairs of danger. The narration doesn’t hide the fact that Allie herself will become one of the “taken” women—instead, the mystery lies in how she will eventually triumph over the mad white supremicist. 

Publishers Weekly called the novel “arresting,” saying, “Power-Greene tells a moving crime tale that’s all too timely.”

“The grandeur of the Harlem Renaissance beautifully backgrounds The Confessions of Matthew Strong,” said Associate Professor Paul Beatty. “Fitting because, like Rudolph Fisher and Zora Neale Hurston, Power-Greene knows from slave shackle to noose to the nightly news, the black experience in America has been a perpetual crime story. This moving and exceedingly sharp thriller shreds the pretense that America’s murderous history is a ‘whodunit’ and not a ‘wedunit.’” 

In this excerpt, the prologue and the opening pages of the first chapter set the stage for the novel’s main mystery.

The Confessions of Matthew Strong will be released on October 25 and is available for preorder now

Ousmane K. Power-Greene is the Program Director of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Clark University. Power-Greene is the author of Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle Against the Colonization Movement, and his writing appears in The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters. He’s been featured on All Things Considered, C-SPAN Book TV, and NPR’s history podcast Throughline.