About the Author

Imani K. Wynn — Author of The Ironwood Saga

The Ironwood Saga is a cycle of historical novels exploring what rises from the wreckage of a failed Reconstruction.

Alongside the fiction runs The Fracture Archive, a companion project presented as the recovered writings of Mable L. Smith, a historian living in the world that emerged after the Fracture.
Together, they trace how a nation built on contradiction collapses — and what new sovereignties might grow from its ruins.

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Author’s Note

I was never taught Reconstruction. In school we leapt from Appomattox to Martin Luther King Jr. as though freedom had simply arrived. The years in between — when the country tried to rebuild itself, failed, and taught itself to forget — were left blank.

When I finally learned what happened, I understood how fragile the experiment had always been. Reconstruction wasn’t a healing; it was a brief negotiation before the country turned away from democracy and embraced caste, hierarchy, empire. Every unburied tension — citizenship, labor, land, belonging — was left to rot under that silence.

The Fracture Archive begins at the point of failure — when the Union’s compromise with white supremacy finally tore the country apart. It asks what might have happened if the United States hadn’t survived its own contradictions and, instead, splintered under the weight of them. It contemplates what might arise out of that collapse: new sovereignties, new charters, and a long effort to remember what had been erased.

Mable L. Smith writes from within that world: a descendant of survivors cataloguing what remains of the old republic. My role is to listen across the divide and translate the record of their endurance back into ours.

— Imani K. Wynn
Curator of The Fracture Archive