On Sale 9/10/2024
MAYOR OF THE TENDERLOIN
Del Seymour's Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco
In the Mayor of Tenderloin, journalist Alison Owings slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism surrounding San Francisco’s Tenderloin to reveal a harrowing and life-affirming account of Del Seymour—whose addiction led him into 18 years of homelessness, pimping, and drug dealing. Once sober, he started Tenderloin Walking Tours and later Code Tenderloin, the remarkable organization teaching homeless, recovering addicts, sex workers, dealers, ex-felons, and other marginalized people how to get and keep a job.
Honest and compelling, Mayor of Tenderloin follows homelessness in one of America’s toughest neighborhoods as it was lived—in the words of someone who lived it and is now fighting to solve it.
photo credit: Judy Dater
Praise
(Frauen)
“Time and again Owings probes, coaxes, humours and inveigles her way into cosy intimacy with a wide range of housewives, heroines, diehards, dissenters, ex-prisoners, ex-guards. … [in] this amusing, frightening, and consistently illuminating book.”
–Martin Amis, author of The Zone of Interest
“Thank you for your work and Indian Voices!”
-wrote author Louise Erdrich in a private note.
(Frauen)
“Oral history at its best.”
–Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”
“In vivid and often poignant portraits-cum-interviews . . . [Owings] has captured the extraordinary diversity of their experiences . . . each portrait, each interview, provides valuable insight into what happened to half the German population between 1933 and 1945.”–New York Times Book Review
Alison Owings, author of three stereotype-challenging oral-history based books, including a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” has finished a fourth.
It is an unconventional, often humorous, wrenching, and inspiring tale about an extraordinary and resourceful African-American man — who is attempting to redeem his past by helping the disenfranchised people of the present. Meet 74-year-old Del Seymour, “the mayor of the Tenderloin” in San Francisco, whose addiction to crack led him into some 18 years of homelessness, hustling, pimping, and dealing — and who then, once clean, started Code Tenderloin, the astonishing organization teaching homeless, drug dealers, ex-felons, and other marginalized people how to get and keep a straight job.
A May 2020 article about him appeared in The New York Times:
Tech Is a Citadel. Del Seymour Built a Drawbridge.
As a work-in-progress, Mayor of the Tenderloin received the 2018 Mayborn Biography Award.
Her earlier works include:
Indian Voices / Listening to Native Americans
Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray
Frauen / German Women Recall the Third Reich.
Featured Article:
"The Offer": A homeless Vietnam vet gets an unexpected second chance, Salon, Nov 28, 2021
NEWS:
Alison, having founded the Washington, DC activist group "Don't Tear It Down," now the "D.C. Preservation League," was an honorary co-chair of the group's 50th anniversary gala.
