Nomonde's Sojourn 

After a spiritual crisis in Santa Fe and a near-death moment in 1999, Kiersten Dunbar Chace began writing the fragments of her life as a way to survive them. She wrote of her first forty years, her mother wounds, motherhood, faith, love, travel, spiritual signs, and the encounters that had already begun shaping her into an artist of witness. That original manuscript, written before she became a filmmaker, became the seed of Nomonde’s Sojourn.

​

Now, more than twenty years later, Chace returns to those early pages with the clarity of age and the weight of all that followed: documentary work that reached the United Nations Human Rights Council, film festivals, universities, and academic conferences; journeys through South Africa, Pine Ridge, Sámi cultural memory, and the archaeological landscapes of Arizona; her debut novel; and a life shaped by motherhood, advocacy, art, and spiritual reckoning.

​

Blending memoir, poetry, stories, artwork, photography, dated reflections, and new meditations, Nomonde’s Sojourn traces the transformation of being a mother’s unwanted child into a woman who learned to stand beside the unseen. It is a lyrical memoir-in-fragments about survival, forgiveness, beauty, and return, and a testimony to the patience required to gather a life back into wholeness.

​

​

​