SUMMER READING LIST
A Q&A with Lindsey Krinks on ‘Praying With Our Feet,’ a memoir of her call to community and justice in the streets BY A M ANDA HAGGARD
For Lindsey Krinks, the arc of her work has gone from global to local, first working on global hunger issues and working her way toward issues of collective liberation in Nashville. “Our work, this book, is hopefully speaking toward that liberation in a local context,” Krinks says. Krinks, the co-founder of the nonprofit Open Table Nashville, is also a wellknown name at The Contributor. Much of her work is in the paper’s orbit, and her beginnings in the local activist world congealed around the start of the paper, where her husband Andrew was an editor and where she met and formed many relationship’s with the paper’s earliest vendors
like Ray Ponce De Leon. Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets, which was released on Feb. 2 via Baker Publishing Group, presents Krinks’ story of building community in the context of these kinds of relationships. There’s a thread of vulnerability throughout the book and a sense of being gently guided through some of the most pressing issues in the city. It’s a story of neighbors and friends and what Nashville is up against in the fight for affordable housing. Krinks book centers people experiencing poverty and homelessness — it doesn’t shy away from the harsh truths of living on the streets. “I hope it shows the dignity and agency
and incredible spirits of the people that I've come to love over the years,” Krinks says. “I am just so in awe of the stories of people that have allowed me to accompany them over the years and have taught me so much in the process. I definitely want it to come across that they are the heroes of my story.” The book came out right on the heels of this large-scale traumatic event. Talk a little bit about planning the release during this past year. I actually finished the first draft of the book two days before the tornado hit. And then, of course, like the next week was the safer at home order — safer at home for
PAGE 8 | May 26-June 9, 2021 | The Contributor | NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
all those with homes. So I had finished it largely before the pandemic hit, but was doing the editing work and kind of revision work with the editors through all of this. Basically homelessness is one long endless cycle of and crisis. And so people on the streets have already lived through so many terrible tragedies and crisis situations. This was just another one and it was just another huge one, you know, that was global in scale. It was just a really difficult year for everybody. It made me think about the crisis situations that were unfolding. Definitely made me more convinced than ever that housing is a human right, and that everybody deserves to have safe, dignified
