Name: Book Signing: A Soldier’s Life, A Black Woman’s Rise from Army Brat to Six Triple Eight Champion
Start: 2026-01-24T15:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-01-24T17:00:00-05:00
Location: CityCenter GalleryandBooks

$Book Signing: A Soldier\u2019s Life, A Black Woman\u2019s Rise from Army Brat to Six Triple Eight Champion$

“A fresh contribution to Black history.” ~Kirkus Reviews
“A Soldier’s Life, published by University of Virginia Press, delivered a profound and inspiring memoir…”
~EIN Presswire November 3, 2025
Award winning author and Fayetteville native COL (Ret.) Edna W. Cummings can justly say that “the odds ain’t good, but good stuff happens.” Her story is as inspiring as it is improbable, but her memoir is about much more than herself. Chronicling Cummings’s unlikely but successful path to leadership roles in the army and afterward, it also tells the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, known as the Six Triple Eight—a trailblazing African American World War II Women’s Army Corps unit now the subject of a Netflix film and a Broadway-bound musical—and the grassroots campaign Cummings led to honor them.
In 2022, due in large part to Cummings’s efforts, the Six Triple Eight was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor—the Congressional Gold Medal. Among the fewer than two hundred recipients, including the crew of Apollo 11 and the Navajo Code Talkers, the Six Triple Eight is the only women’s unit to receive this prestigious decoration. In A Soldier’s Life Colonel Cummings narrates her path from childhood to advocate and how she overcame incredible odds not only for herself but on behalf of those who had come before her.