Emergence will be available for local pickup in Barnesville beginning mid-June 2026. Price: $29.95
To reserve your copy, send payment with your name and phone number to: Venmo: @Jessica-Traylor-14 OR Cash App: $jtraylor1113
All author profits are donated back to the Lamar County community.
They say there are two sides to every story. But when dozens of people sit down to tell the truth about the same place, the same halls, the same years, the same institution, what emerges isn’t two sides. It’s something far more complicated. And far more human.
For two years, Gordon State College students sat across from alumni and listened. Really listened. Thirty-seven people. Four decades of transition. One institution that meant completely different things depending on who you were inside it.
Emergence: Power, Belonging, and the Stories that Shape Us is an oral history of Gordon Military College in Barnesville, Georgia, from the height of its military culture through desegregation and its absorption into the University System of Georgia. It holds the whole Gordon: the pride and the cost, both at once.
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About Emergence
Gordon Military College sat at the center of Barnesville, Georgia for over a century. It was a military boarding academy, a segregated city high school, and a state-funded junior college all at the same time, on the same campus, in the same small town.
For white students, Gordon was camaraderie and structure. For Black students, it was survival. Black students were forced to prove their humanity again and again, breaking barriers along the way.
Every community has a version of this story, an institution that shaped who belonged, whose history got preserved, and whose silence subsidized the system. The patterns in this book are not locked in the past. They show up now: in who gets welcomed and who gets watched, in which stories a town tells about itself and which ones it buries, in what happens when a place chooses comfort over truth.
This book is for anyone who has ever sat in a room and known the official story wasn’t the whole story. It’s for people who serve on boards, teach in schools, lead organizations, or simply live in towns where the past is still shaping who gets a seat at the table. It’s for readers who want to understand how institutions break people and how people refuse to break.
If you’ve ever wondered what it costs a community to forget, and what it takes to remember, this is that book.
About The Author
I grew up down the road from Gordon. I later returned to teach there full-time, after years as an adjunct. For two decades as a school psychologist, I’ve walked into schools still quietly divided by race and income, watched neighborhoods carry the weight of choices made long ago, and seen new lines being drawn in present times. There are still lines around who is worthy of belonging, who is kept at a distance, and who is made to repeatedly prove their right to stay.
My work in psychology, human services, and adult learning has centered on how people adapt, how they heal, and how communities protect what feels safe, even when it costs them dearly. Emergence grew out of that work.
It is published by Full Circle Press.
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Speaking and Events
Emergence began in community and it belongs in community.
I offer talks, facilitated sessions, and workshops built around the book’s oral histories and research. These are not lectures. They’re designed to help groups sit with the complexity of how institutions shape belonging, how communities navigate change, and how memory gets protected or erased depending on who holds the power.
Every event uses a four-phase facilitation model: Recognition, Complexity, Dissonance, and Reorientation. We start with what people already know and move toward what the stories ask of us.
What I Offer:
- Author talk and Q&A
- Keynote on community resilience and institutional change
- Facilitated book discussion on memory, belonging, and change
- Half-day and full-day workshops
- In person and virtual
Best For:
- Libraries and museums
- Historical societies
- Community organizations and non-profits
- Educator groups and student cohorts
- Civic and leadership groups
- Universities and colleges
- Boards and commissions
Stay Connected
Sign up for updates on the book release, community events, and the stories behind Emergence.