Brooklyn born novelist, poet, educator and international speaker, Ellease Ebele N. Oseye, whom Maya Angelou described as “a seer of the interior landscape,” has been teaching literature of African peoples at Pace University for 48 years. She has also taught at Borough of Manhattan Community College for twenty years. Professor Oseye’s novel, Let the Lion Eat Straw, honors the life of her mother, Ellease Dozier Southerland, musician, mother of nine sons and six daughters. The African Burial Ground National Monument holds a sacred place in the heart of this author who listened with unbelieving ears as her mother made real the brutality of enslavement.