Linda Jordan "Crooked Road Straight: The Awakening of AIDS Activist Linda Jordan" is a phenomenal and personal journey of how Linda Carole Jordan, a woman whose life was a struggle just to survive, became a messenger of hope for families coping with AIDS.

Linda emerged in the 1990s as an advocate who believed that people like her, those who lived day by day with the AIDS pandemic, were under-represented in the nation's public health prevention campaigns. This book takes the reader down the path taken by Linda, a second-generation welfare recipient and a heroin addict, over five harrowing decades in Hartford, Connecticut, one of America's poorest cities.

Based on 12 years of interviews by award-winning reporter Tina A. Brown, "Crooked Road Straight" is a riveting narrative of Linda's colorful yet troubled life as told in her voice. This book of creative nonfiction weaves together stories told by Linda and her family; detailed observations of the author; and documents from case files of Linda and her family provided by the Connecticut Department of Children and Families.

"Crooked Road Straight" puts a human face on the statistics of a community that still deals with AIDS in secrecy. African-American women like Linda were 13 percent of the female population in the United States, but accounted for 67 percent of the estimated AIDS cases in 2004, according to The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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