Author: SHE LIT EDITOR

I started she lit in 2016 as a personal blog to describe my adventures in Los Angeles aspiring to be novelist while holding down a day job as a news editor and engaging with other readers on the hottest books of the moment. From my love of creating news and features content, I reshaped she lit into a blog for women looking for interesting stories on the books they’re reading, the authors they’re following, and everything in between. Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | shewrites@shelit.com.

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Representation Matters With New ‘Little Mermaid’

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The Little Mermaid is in theaters and in books during #Mermay 🪸

Cue hot mermaid summer with classic fairy tale returning as live-action Disney remake


With The Little Mermaid debuting this weekend, you know the obsession over merfolks will dominate the culture for the rest of the year, right?


Like most toddler girls, I was enthralled with Disney’s 1989 animated version of The Little Mermaid, the most famous fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen. Growing up in the coastal neighborhood of Rogers Park in Chicago, I imagined myself as a mermaid far too many times with beaches in walking distance.


But as much as I wanted to be Ariel, she didn’t look like me. She had long ketchup-red hair and over-animated blue eyes, and while under the sea she was just a mermaid, on land she was a young White woman.


This led to my parents looking high and low for Black mermaids. The search was fruitful with Sukey and the Mermaid. The 1992 book featured the first time I saw a Black mermaid.


The story is by children’s author Robert D. San Souci, who was known for bringing folktales to life. The book is beautifully illustrated by Brian Pinkney. In the story, a girl named Sukey has to do the back-breaking work on her family’s farm all day. Her stepfather is a “bossy, do-nothing” man, and her mother acts oblivious to Sukey’s suffering.


One day, Sukey seeks refuge by the sea. After singing a song about what she thought was a fictional mermaid, she realizes she summoned Mama Jo, a “beautiful, brown-skinned, black-eyed mermaid” adorned in gold jewelry along her seaweed green hair. Mama Jo notices Sukey’s sadness and offers to bring her undersea. Nobody is suffering there (except for Ariel, but that’s another story). So Sukey must decide if she wants to stay on land with her abusive family or find peace beneath the surface.


At the end, the author’s note reads that the folktale came from a recording called “The Mermaid” in Elsie Clews Parsons’ Folk-lore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina published in 1923 by the American Folklore Society. “It is one of the relatively few authenticated African-American folktales involving mermaids,” the note reads.


As you can tell, I have a deep interest in merfolk culture, particularly when it relates to the African diaspora. When Disney first announced Halle Bailey of Chloe x Halle fame would step into the fin of Ariel for the live-action film of The Little Mermaid, there was uproar because she was Black. At the time, I wrote a blog post about how the Disney film unintentionally perpetuated a White mermaid image that some people do not want to let go of, or acknowledge that communities around the world have similar legends.


The story was written by a Danish author, so the main character is presumably Danish, but it’s also a universal story that features the imaginary half-person, half-fish creatures who swim across the globe. Whether you like mermaids or not, the fact that this fairy tale has resonated for almost 200 years for generations is an extraordinary power for a story.

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What we’re highlighting


Penguin Random House joins lawsuit against school district

The largest book publisher in the U.S. partnered with PEN America, several authors, and several parents in suing a Florida school district over allegedly removing books from bookshelves that received public complaints. PEN America, the free speech foundation, claims Escambia County School District and School Board removed and restricted certain titles discussing race, racism, and LGBTQ identities, “some of which have been on the shelves for years—even decades.”


Indie publisher Brown Girls Books announces new CEO

The boutique run by authors ReShonda Tate and Victoria Christopher Murray has hired a new CEO. In an Instagram video, the founders introduced CEO Tanisha Tate, who is also ReShonda’s sister, as she promised to boost the business on behalf of the still-active authors. The publisher boasts a roster of over 40 authors, including reality star Gizelle Bryant and TV producer Stacey Evans Morgan.


Here are some summer reads featuring merfolks:

American Mermaid by Julia Langbein: An English teacher is surprised when her feminist novel becomes a best-seller. She soon finds herself in Los Angeles to capitalize on the book’s potential in becoming a screen adaptation. As her main character morphs from an “androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra,” karma seems to follow the teacher who tried to bring a mermaid to life.


The Pisces by Melissa Broder: Lucy is a doctoral student finishing the thesis she’s been working on for nine years when her boyfriend breaks up with her. To get back on track and nurse her broken heart, she accepts an invitation to dog-sit in Venice Beach. There, she falls in love with a merman and debates whether she should escape reality and follow him into his oceanic world. Book review on shelit.com.


Shallow Waters by Anita Kopacz: This story shows Yemaya, an Orïsha or a deity in the religion of Africa’s Yoruba people, as an enslaved woman in 19th century America not yet knowing her superpower. She searches for a man who sacrifices his own freedom for her to see freedom. On her journey, she grows into the powerful woman she was destined to become.


Skin of the Sea and Soul of the Deep by Natasha Bowen: These books focus on Simi, who serves as Mami Wata, the water goddess who collects the souls of those who die at sea and blesses their journeys back home. But she saves a living boy from the water, breaking the ancient decree. She has to make amends, but that journey becomes dangerous.


You can find book reviews on other mermaid-themed books such as:

Grown by Tiffany D. Jackson

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow

What we’re reviewing

Nikki Giovanni Talks About Libraries Supporting Readers on Earth and Mars


Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni joined Books in Bloom in Columbia, Maryland, to discuss the importance of libraries, including one in outer space.


The book festival’s headliner was introduced as someone who identifies as an “earthling” by Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallat. This led to a conversation with Nikki discussing her work with libraries and her curation for a library on Mars.


A library was established in 2008 by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, thanks to the funding and development from The Planetary Society, where TV scientist Bill Nye is the CEO. The space shuttle left an encoded archival silica-glass mini-DVD on Mars and called it the Visions of Mars digital time capsule.

Check out the full blog post here

What we’re watching

Merpeople on Netflix follows the people who have turned cosplaying as a mermaid, merman, or merperson into a career or an expensive hobby. I’m on the fringes of the mermaid cosplay world, so please support my friends as they explain their transformations into the merpeople of their dreams.

What the plans are


The Mountain Words Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, takes place during the Memorial Day weekend from May 25-28 with readings, workshops, kids’ events, panel discussions, and live theater. Ticket prices can be found here.

Where the opportunities are


Library of America is looking for someone interested in a publishing career for its Diverse Voices Editorial Fellowship. The full-time, two-year program will have this fellow work closely with the editorial and production team to develop and publish 20 new titles and dozens of reprints each year.

“Because I feel like, if I would have had a Black mermaid, that would have been insane, that would have changed my whole perspective, my whole life, my confidence, my self-worth. You’re able to see a person who looks like you, when you’re young? Some people are just like, oh, it’s whatever, because they’ve had it their whole life. It’s nothing to them. But it’s so important.” – Halle Bailey, the star of The Little Mermaid, on representation in media

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Belonging’ by Michelle Miller

Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love by Michelle Miller with Rosemarie Robotham shows the CBS Saturday Morning cohost go through childhood and adulthood wondering the whereabouts of a mother who refused to raise her. 

Born at the end of 1967, Michelle arrives back in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968. The night before, her father, Dr. Ross Miller, becomes embedded in one of U.S. history’s most tragic events: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Michelle’s father was the first doctor to examine the presidential candidate’s gunshot wounds. Still a newborn, Michelle flies back to the city of her recent birth from Birmingham, Alabama, after her grandmother, Bigmama, discovers her existence. Her father sent his secret daughter to family in Alabama, but Bigmama demanded her granddaughter return to LA. It’s Bigmama’s responsibility to raise Michelle out of sight from her son’s wife and two adopted daughters. This is where the journalist’s story begins. 

Her mother, a Chicana fair enough to pass as White, worked in the same hospital as her married father, a top Black cardiopulmonary surgeon. Their affair sparks hate from her mother’s family; they only see their daughter and sister dating a Black man. Once her mother, known by the pseudonym Laura Hernandez throughout the book, gives Michelle to her father, the doctor depends on his family to raise his first biological child. As Michelle grows up around civil rights activists like her father, attends a historically Black college like her father, and embarks on a news career, she leans into her Black identity while wondering about her other ethnicity and the woman who birthed her. 

“All my life, I had encountered people who would take note of my light skin, long wavy hair, and pointed features and be curious about my ethnicity. ‘What are you exactly?’ they might ask. ‘I’m Black,’ I would tell them, cheerfully removing their confusion. Sometimes, if I was in the mood to claim my mother’s contributions to my heritage, despite her absence from my life, I might say, ‘My father is Black, and my mother is Hispanic.’” 

Growing up in 1970s South Los Angeles, Michelle attends predominantly Black schools at first then gets bussed far away to attend predominantly White schools. Bigmama, who is 73 when she starts raising her newborn granddaughter, is a retired teacher, so education is prioritized in their household. Michelle’s father lives in his own townhouse in Long Beach and visits often after his shift at the hospital. He also brings in girlfriends who become a part of Michelle’s greater village, such as civil rights legend Xernona Clayton, who Michelle lovingly calls “Big.” 

When Bigmama gets sick as Michelle becomes a teenager, a neighbor named Vondela starts to help out in the house. She becomes Michelle’s surrogate guardian and also takes care of Michelle’s adopted sister Cheryl. Bigmama’s house evolves and expands with the village once Michelle attends Howard University to continue her family’s legacy of attending the renowned HBCU in Washington, D.C. There, she develops her journalism career while making lifelong friends like her roommate, actress Wendy Raquel Robinson. After graduation, she starts hitting the pavement looking for opportunities to report on the news.

“For one thing, I had spent years obsessing over the mother who did not stay, and fixating on the maternal surrogates who had been there for me while their relationships with my father ran their course. Yet I had hardly noted that it was Vondela who had truly stepped up to care for me. She had been more of a mother to me than anyone else, save Bigmama.” 

By the time she starts her news career, her father is diagnosed with cancer. He gives Michelle her mother’s contact information. He says her mother should know who she is. Michelle doesn’t know what to do with the information, her motherlessness always lingering in the background of her ambitious life. She eventually calls her mother for the first time. As the years and decades pass, even with Michelle starting a family of her own with former New Orleans mayor and National Urban League president Marc Morial, she finds that every time she reaches out to the woman genetically linked to her as her mother that she longs for answers she may never get. 

“Suddenly, my mother’s decades-old abandonment of me felt as near and as raw as if it had happened yesterday. In becoming a mother, I had stumbled upon a vast reservoir of hurt that I hadn’t even realized I was still carrying, one that might have been forever drained of its poison with one simple act—a phone call or a card from my mother hailing the arrival of our beloved boy.” 

This memoir touches the deep vein of living without a mother who is alive and well. From child to adult, Michelle wonders about her mother’s whereabouts while people around her are wondering the same. She is able to connect with people like a young man she dates during a foreign exchange program in Kenya who didn’t know his late mother, or like her stepdaughter who is raised mostly in the Ivory Coast with her mother without spending the same adequate time with her father in the U.S.

Not having a mother distorts her life journey a bit since she’s always expecting her mother to show up magically to support her for the important events, but other women show up instead. Her motherly surrogates seem numerous as her father inadvertently creates a village for Michelle. She is raised by her grandmother, her neighbor, her father’s girlfriends, and her family friends. The African proverb of it taking a village to raise a child is in action, yet there is still the longing for Michelle to have her two biological parents raising her. 

Overall, from the storytelling perspective, the underlying motherlessness weaves into the author’s life moments smoothly. She wonders where her mother is as a child, for example, seeing other girls at her school getting picked up from school by their mothers. But that feeling remains when she becomes a mother to her own son and daughter and still wonders if her mother will show up as a doting grandmother. The racial undertones of the reason why her mother is missing is also explained well as a reminder that her White-passing Chicana mother refused to be a present mother simply because her daughter was the product of an affair with a Black man. This story shows how there are still families who have missing members due to racism and the fear of prejudice.

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experiences

Nikki Giovanni Talks About Libraries Supporting Readers on Earth and Mars

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni joined Books in Bloom in Columbia, Maryland, on May 13 to discuss the importance of libraries, including one in outer space.

The book festival’s headliner was introduced as someone who identifies as an “earthling” by Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallat. This led to a conversation with Nikki discussing her work with libraries and her curation for a library on Mars.

A library was established in 2008 by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, thanks to the funding and development from The Planetary Society, where TV scientist Bill Nye is the CEO. The space shuttle left an encoded archival silica-glass mini-DVD on Mars and called it the Visions of Mars digital time capsule.

The DVD contains a collection of literature and art about Mars from mostly male authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Carl Sagan. California-bred science fiction author Leigh Douglass Brackett, who was dubbed the Queen of Space Opera; Canadian sci-fi author Candas Jane Dorsey, and Finnish speculative fiction author Johanna Sinisalo seem to be the only women whose texts are in the interplanetary library of over 80 literary works. The DVD was designed to last hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, according to the society.

It’s unclear if Nikki was referring to the 15-year-old library already on Mars having its collection updated. At the festival, Nikki said she was tapped to curate a library that will be on the Red Planet. Though the first collection had works in English, she said this time the library she is working on will translate works into the Navajo language as the oldest language in the U.S.

“Whatever life forms might come to Mars and say, ‘What is this?’ It’s going to be a disc. ‘Oh, that one is something called English, but let’s get this. This is our language,'” she said. “Because Navajo is probably someplace else in the universe.”

Her work coincides with the new documentary on her decades-long civil rights activism and Afro-futuristic views on outer space called Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. It debuted at Sundance Film Festival this past January and is still on a film festival tour.

“The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans,” she says on the documentary’s website. She sees connecting with other life forms as a way to evolve past the division we see with race and gender in global history, she said at the festival.

“When we go into Mars or we go all the way up to Jupiter, we won’t be lost,” she said. “We will know where we’ll be going, and we’ll be meeting the people there, the other life forms there.”

Nikki was also promoting her newest book, A Library, a children’s picture book released last year and illustrated by Erin K. Robinson. From mentioning her childhood library, she shared how her grandparents lived on a street in the “colored” section of Knoxville, Tennessee, called Mulvaney Street. The library was at the top of the street. After a small Black community was established there, she said the University of Tennessee eventually used eminent domain to force the Black families to move away.

She is now working on a book about the former Mulvaney Street—later renamed Hall of Fame Drive she says in honor of basketball coach Pat Summitt—so the historically Black neighborhood would not be forgotten. Her essay, 400 Mulvaney Street, in her 1971 book, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet, also touches on her feelings about losing her grandparents’ home to an “urban renewal” project in the 1960s.

Going from Mars to Knoxville, she says our own stories should be considered vital since we would be the only ones to tell our individual stories.

“There is always a story. I think a lot of people forget there’s always a story,” she said. “A lot of people say, ‘I want to write an important book or I want to write a best-seller’… When I was teaching, the first thing I would say to my class: ‘What is the number one best-seller?’ And not one of them ever knew, not one of them knew the number one best-seller. If you don’t know what it is, then why do you want to be it?”

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The Judy Blume Book That Changed Everything

<![CDATA[SHE LIT: The Judy Blume Book That Changed Everything ♾️]]> SHE LIT: The Judy Blume Book That Changed Everything ♾️
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Banned coming-of-age novel that boosted middle grade genre finally gets its flowers


I finished Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret during a daylong doctor’s appointment when I was nine years old. The famous Judy Blume story was already over 25 years old when I devoured it in less than 24 hours. I was wearing a training bra and the loom of the period was hanging over my head since some of my fourth-grade friends already had theirs. I laughed at the characters kissing their pillows to practice kissing boys because I wasn’t there yet. I talked to God a lot growing up in an interfaith household like the main character Margaret.


With Margaret and her friends worrying about kissing boys, buying bras, and getting periods, the 1970 book has enjoyed a revival with a new film in theaters amid the latest banned books movement. Describing feelings many kids feel that many parents pretend are not there turned Judy into a best-selling author with Margaret revolutionizing the middle grade genre.


Judy Blume Forever, a new documentary on Amazon Prime Video about the author’s career, couples with the cinematic release of Margaret and the news of other forthcoming book-to-film adaptations like one for Forever…, the 1975 book that ushered in the young adult genre. In the documentary, Judy says the character of Margaret helped her dive deep to tell the story of a true American girl who is talking to God about the changes within her body and within her life.


The book was No. 60 on the list of most challenged books in the 1990s, according to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. This was a result of the rise of book bans inside public and school libraries under the Reagan administration for most of the 1980s. The frequent mention of menstruation made the book a target.


Florida, for example, is currently moving a bill—coined the “Don’t Say Period” bill by some opponents—that restricts reproductive education at schools. Girls on average start their periods between ages 10 to 16, according to the National Institutes of Health. They need access to Margaret to feel less alone in their experiences, especially if they won’t be taught about what’s happening within their bodies.


What we’re seeing now resembles the peak of book bans from 40 years ago. News of these bans have been relatively quiet until the past two years where the volume is getting louder by the day.


The film version of Margaret grossed $6.8 million in its opening weekend, below expectations with mostly women buying tickets compared to girls, according to Deadline. So, maybe the story mostly resonates with the girls of previous decades, but it’s a win for a long-censored book getting attention from Hollywood.


Because of Margaret and her subsequent books, Judy became used to her work being challenged. But it seems we see her more publicly as she fights back against the growing lists of books being challenged due to authors following in her footsteps of writing authentic fiction for kids. The kids who grew up reading her books are now writing their own, except the controversial issues remain the same.


The film should have a DVD release, but will the DVD be banned from public and school libraries like the book? To get around the library or even the bookstore, the book could be bought online or the film could be found on a streaming service, but will the kids who are wondering about their worlds find a story like Margaret? That’s the constant concern in this moment.

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What we’re highlighting


Illinois governor set to sign bill to deter book banning

Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, says he plans to sign the state’s House Bill 2789, which threatens to defund public and school libraries if they remove books on shelves based on consumer complaints. Illinois will be the first state to enact such a law whereas other local and state governing bodies are exploring the opposite direction: defunding libraries that fail to remove books that consumers requested be removed.


Miami nonprofit plans to provide banned books to Floridians

Black historian Marvin Dunn and his nonprofit, the Miami Center for Racial Justice, will launch a program to give families banned books in order for them to learn about Black history, according to Miami New Times. The professor emeritus at Florida International University was inspired to create such a program after the viral news that a history textbook removed the mention of Rosa Parks being Black to avoid violating Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.


Here are the May celebrity book club picks

Audacious Book Club and Read With Jenna are reading Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Belletrist Book Club is reading I Could Live Here Forever by Hanna Halperin

GMA Book Club is reading The Nigerwife by Vanessa Walters

Lilly’s Library is reading Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah

Noname Book Club is reading All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou

Oprah’s Book Club is reading The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Reese’s Book Club is reading Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? by Crystal Smith Paul


Also what’s lit…

  • Zaila Avant-garde, the first Black student to win the national spelling bee and basketball record holder, has a new advice book for teens out this week.

  • Ntozake Shange’s unpublished works will be released in the fall in a new book edited by Imani Perry.

  • Christine Platt of The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living With Less teased a forthcoming novel about two neighbors exploring racial equity in suburbia.

What we’re reviewing

‘Joy Luck Club’ Author Amy Tan Shares How Her Work Became an ‘Unintended Memoir’


For Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Netflix debuted a two-hour documentary about Chinese American best-selling author Amy Tan that focused on how her books became reflections of her life and her mother’s life.


After seeing immediate success with her debut novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989, Amy started a writing career that followed the story’s legacy of featuring two generations of American-born daughters and Chinese-born mothers.


The documentary follows Amy’s childhood where she loses her older brother and father both within six months of their back-to-back brain tumor diagnoses. Amy talks about feeling scared being left with her suicidal mother, who moves Amy and her younger brother to Holland from the San Francisco Bay Area. Once she returns to the U.S. for college, Amy reconnects with her best friend who was another child of the real-life Joy Luck Club, a small social group of Chinese American immigrants who met to discuss investment opportunities, play mahjong and cards, and feast at midnight with the kids.


Years later, Amy is making a career as a business technical writer and living with her husband. One day she receives a call from her brother that her mother had a life-threatening heart attack. She said she made a vow to God that she will spend more time with her mother and talk to her about her life in China. When Amy connects with her mother, she learns her mother experienced angina after an argument at a fish market. Her mother was fine, but the promise echoes and inspires her to sit down with her mother and discover her mother’s life in China.

Check out the full blog post here

What we’re watching

Dear Mama on FX and Hulu is a five-part docuseries that shares the story of poet and rapper Tupac Shakur and his relationship with his mother Afeni Shakur. Afeni’s revolutionary roots taking sprout in the 1970s as a female leader within the Black Panther Party is also told in the 2005 book Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary by Jasmine Guy, best known as Whitley Gilbert in the classic NBC sitcom A Different World.

What the plans are


Nikki Giovanni will headline the Books in Bloom annual festival in Columbia, Maryland, on May 13 and will also participate in a panel discussing libraries and community centers.


No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, a show co-written by Eve L. Ewing that uses intricate paper puppetry and other multimedia elements, will play at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago from May 16-17.


Samantha Irby with Symphony Space will be in conversation for her latest essay collection Quietly Hostile with Cynthia Nixon, Ilana Glazer, Aminatou Sow, and Jia Tolentino at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on May 17 in New York City.

Where the opportunities are


Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press is accepting applications until May 21 for its 10-month paid Citizen Literary Fellowship designed to support a person who is interested in learning more about the publishing industry.

“We’re not telling you what books to buy or not buy. What we’re saying is, if a book is in circulation as determined by the libraries and the librarians, that book cannot be banned because a group of individuals don’t like or want that book in their library. That’s what the legislation is all about.”

– Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias on the passage of HB 2789

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Editing Authors Amid Banned Books

SHE LIT: Editing Authors Amid Banned Books 📖

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#currentlyreading Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell

Why authors of color tend to lean into indie publishers to get their work distributed


Maggie Tokuda-Hall went viral this week for claiming she declined a book deal with Scholastic over an edit to remove any references to the word “racism” in her children’s book. Her actions show the reason why many authors of color prefer to have their books published through indie publishers and self-publishing companies: To be able to tell the stories they envisioned with their authentic lived experiences.


The author from Oakland, California, wrote Love in the Library, a children’s book centered on a love story set in a World War II incarceration camp for Japanese Americans. The story is inspired by her grandparents who fell in love at one of these camps. She writes about the inspiration in an author’s note. But Scholastic allegedly wanted to tweak the contents of that note to make the book more consumable for classrooms, as many are dealing with banned books.


In the author’s note, Maggie writes her grandparents’ “improbable joy does not excuse virulent racism, nor does it minimize the pain, the trauma, and the deaths that resulted from it. But it is to situate it into the deeply American tradition of racism.”


Scholastic wanted to remove the word “racism” and the words around it, according to the author and the letter she posted on her website discussing that edit.


“I wrote this author’s note for a lot of reasons,” she wrote in a letter to Scholastic. “Philosophically, because I genuinely believe children deserve the truth, and the truth includes racism. Ethically, because I believe talking about my grandparents in isolation would be misleading, dishonest and wrong — when we do not call what happened to them racism, when we do not connect them to others experiencing racism, we only allow it to happen again.”


In her blog post, Maggie expresses gratitude to the original publisher, Candlewick Press, and her publicist and editor there. What Maggie shared seems to be common for authors of color who may feel like they have to strip down their work for a chance to be published because they mention racial elements in their storylines, or in this case before the storyline starts.


After Maggie went public with her story, Scholastic said it had apologized to her for its editing approach.


“This approach was wrong and not in keeping with Scholastic’s values,” the company’s CEO Peter Warwick wrote in a statement. “We don’t want to diminish or in any way minimize the racism that tragically persists against Asian-Americans.”


Scholastic said it wants to rekindle the conversation about including Love in the Library in its Rising Voices collection featuring works by authors and educators from Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.


This case is a bit different because the main edits seemed to be in an author’s note, rather than the story. It was the author’s choice to fight for her note to describe her reasoning for bringing the story into fruition. Some may argue the edits were minor, or the note was not needed. It all comes down to an author’s decision on whether they sign with a publisher to ensure the book they truly want on bookshelves.

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What we’re highlighting


Libraries make memes over losing blue checks on Twitter

The D.C. Public Library and Los Angeles Public Library are a few of the libraries that had fun with making memes Thursday letting the public know they are still verified spaces even without their Twitter blue checks. Twitter began removing legacy blue checks for individuals and entities that had the famous checks to verify to the public they were real.


Actress refuses to sign book as TV adaptation rumors swirl

Jessica Chastain was shown in a video saying no to a fan who wanted her signature in a copy of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Fans have casted Jessica in the role of Celia St. James, a starlet close to the titular character Evelyn Hugo. So far, no official casting news has been announced. Read the book review here.


Netflix drops details on ‘Perfect Find’ book-to-TV film

The streaming giant shared photos this week revealing stars Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers playing the unlikely couple featured in the romantic comedy film based on Tia Williams’ 2016 novel The Perfect Find. The film will start streaming on June 23 and also stars Gina Torres.


Also what’s lit…

Candice Carty-Williams posted an image of the scripts from her new series based on her best-selling debut Queenie. Read the book review here.


Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s next memoir will focus on her coming-of-age journey in the public spotlight and have a young reader’s adaptation.


Maaza Mengiste’s forthcoming novel A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths, which focuses on a Black German woman trying to survive Hitler’s reign, has been bought at auction by HarperCollins’ UK imprint 4th Estate Books with Doubleday Publishing already securing North American rights for a 2025 release.

What we’re reviewing

‘Shakti Girls’ Author Shetal Shah Uses Poetry to Tell the Stories of Indian Innovators


A former teacher who taught at all-girls schools, Shetal Shah said she noticed how girls’ self-esteems soared when they were learning about women of various diverse backgrounds. This has led to Shakti Girls, her debut children’s picture book featuring poetic biographies about trailblazing women across the Indian diaspora.


“Shakti” refers to an individual’s divine power and energy in traditional Hinduism. This energy is considered female because mothers have the power to birth new life, according to the first page of the book. Throughout the book, the poems highlight the accomplishments of newsmakers such as Vice President Kamala Harris to actress-producer Mindy Kaling, but we also learn about former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, gymnast Mohini Bhardwaj, and astronaut Kalpana Chawla.


Empowering Hindi words and motivating messages are woven into the verses to affirm each young reader’s identity and self-esteem. A short glossary of English and Hindi words is provided on each page to enhance the experience, as well as activities to empower one’s inner shakti.


The inspiration to tell these stories are not only from Shetal’s education background, but it also pairs with her upbringing in New York City as a second-generation Indian American. She talks to she lit about telling these women’s stories in rhythm and seeing her children’s reactions to the finished product.

Check out the conversation here

What we’re watching

Saint X on Hulu premiers on April 26 bringing Alexis Schaitkin’s critically acclaimed novel to life about a young woman still coming to terms with her sister’s mysterious death years earlier on a family island vacation. Read the book review here.

What the plans are


The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the nation’s largest literary event, will have over 500 authors, poets, artists, celebrities, and musicians make an appearance on April 22-23 in-person on the campus of the University of Southern California.


The Newburyport Literary Festival will be held April 28-30 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and feature authors like Rebecca Makkai, Kamila Shamsie, and Allegra Goodman.


The Ohioana Library Association’s annual Ohioana Book Festival will take place on April 22, at Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Main Library in Columbus, Ohio.

Where the opportunities are


The Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland is accepting applications until May 7 for its free Social Justice Camp, a weeklong day camp teaching rising high schoolers how to engage their activism.


Scholastic Kids Press are accepting Kid Reporter applications until June 1 for the 2023–2024 program for students between the ages of 10–14 who will have to write a news story, two story ideas, and a personal essay.

“They want to sell our suffering, smoothed down and made palatable to the white readers they prioritize. To assuage white guilt with stories that promise to make them better people, while never threatening them, not even with discomfort. They have no investment in our voices. Always, our voices are the first sacrifice at the altar of marketability.” – Maggie Tokuda-Hall on responding to Scholastic’s edits to her author’s note

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‘Shakti Girls’ Author Shetal Shah Uses Poetry to Tell the Stories of Indian Innovators

A former teacher who taught at all-girls schools, Shetal Shah said she noticed how the girls’ self-esteems soared when they were learning about women of various diverse backgrounds. This has led to Shakti Girls, her debut children’s picture book featuring poetic biographies about trailblazing women across the Indian diaspora.

“Shakti” refers to an individual’s divine power and energy in traditional Hinduism. This energy is considered female because mothers have the power to birth new life, according to the first page of the book. Throughout the book, the poems highlight the accomplishments of newsmakers such as Vice President Kamala Harris to actress-producer Mindy Kaling, but we also learn about former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, gymnast Mohini Bhardwaj, and astronaut Kalpana Chawla.

Empowering Hindi words and motivating messages are woven into the verses to affirm each young reader’s identity and self-esteem. A short glossary of English and Hindi words is provided on each page to enhance the experience, as well as activities to empower one’s inner shakti.

The inspiration to tell these stories are not only from Shetal’s education background, but it also pairs with her upbringing in New York City as a second-generation Indian American. She talks to she lit about telling these women’s stories in rhythm and seeing her children’s reactions to the finished product. Check out the conversation below:

she lit: How did you come up with the concept to tell these stories in rhyme and intentionally use Hindi words and phrases in the poems?

Shetal: The idea of sharing these stories was in the back of my mind for quite some time. However, it was my youngest son who sparked the idea to present them in a more engaging format that would resonate with young readers. In order to capture their imagination, I knew the writing had to be lively, fun, and ignite their thirst for learning.

As an educator, I was aware of the cognitive benefits of rhyme in enhancing memory retention and concentration. Additionally, having experienced the sheer pleasure of reading and reciting rhyming poems, I knew it would captivate and delight my audience. With this in mind, I embarked on the task of narrating the stories of these remarkable women in verse.

Later on, I felt compelled to incorporate Hindi words into the poems when I reflected on my own grasp of Hindi and Gujarati, a regional language of India. Having realized that my exposure to these languages did not include many self-affirming and empowering words, I imagined how uplifting it would have felt if the first words I learned were words of empowerment. 

she lit: Growing up as a second-generation Indian American, how and where did you learn about women of Indian descent? What was your sense that classmates and kids around you knew about these women? 

Shetal: Growing up in the United States during the ’80s and ’90s, I did not have access to the resources that would have helped me learn about women of Indian descent. Occasionally, a family member visiting from India would bring me short stories about Hindu goddesses like Lakshmi, but I never encountered a secular book or article about an Indian woman until I learned about Indira Gandhi in high school.

However, the information was limited, and Gandhi remained the only woman of Indian descent I knew about until college. I realized that my knowledge, or lack thereof, was not unique and was likely shared by my peers. Even as a frequent library-goer, I had little knowledge of books and media that celebrated Indian women.

Today, I am grateful to see a shift in diversity represented in children’s literature, but there is still much work to be done. While we have made progress since I was a child, we have yet to scratch the surface of adequate representation.

she lit: From your experience as a teacher at all-girls schools, how did you engage students in learning about women from different ethnic backgrounds who may have been left out of their history lessons? 

Shetal: Witnessing my students’ natural curiosity about the world and its diverse cultures and people was a privilege and a joy. Teaching an extension lesson on Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, as part of our unit about medieval Japan, was particularly memorable. The thoughtful questions and wonderment my students shared about her and her achievement were exciting.

Fortunately, many of the courses I taught fell under the umbrella of global studies, making it easier to introduce diverse cultures and viewpoints within the curriculum. By starting with student inquiry and later giving them the space to reflect and make connections to historical figures like Shikibu, my students took ownership of their learning and forged deep connections that transcended boundaries and cultures.

Learning about history and the people who made it can be incredibly empowering, especially when students are given a choice and voice in how they want to learn. The true challenge, however, was finding the resources to support different learning preferences and interests.

she lit: There is an interactive component with having readers look for symbols related to the poems in the illustrations. What motivated you and illustrator Kavita Rajput to add this type of engagement for young readers? 

Shetal: As an educator, I recognized that incorporating an interactive component would enrich the learning process by enabling readers to make connections between the visual cues and the women featured in the book.

In my teaching practice, I favored a multisensory approach that engaged learners through storytelling (hearing it), illustrations (seeing it), and activities (interacting with it) that fostered reflection and interaction. I was determined to apply this approach to Shakti Girls, as I believed it would create a more meaningful and enjoyable learning experience for readers.

she lit: How have your children reacted to the book and what has impacted them the most? 

Shetal: From the inception of the book, my children were part of the creative process, unapologetically critiquing, editing, and validating all aspects of it. Now, I catch my son who inspired the rhymes, casually reading the book on his own. I can tell they are proud of their mom, but I can also tell they are excited to learn about these brave women and are inspired by their stories.

As a mother of two boys, I am confident that reading this book will help break down any unconsciously held beliefs they have about women and girls. A defining moment for me came when my oldest son, who enjoys swimming competitively, asked me if I knew any Indian American swimmers who had competed at the Olympics. Given the statistics on diversity in the swim world, I wasn’t surprised when our internet research drew a blank.

However, I was able to share Mohini Bhardwaj’s story from my book. As an Olympian and former captain of the USA’s gymnastics team, who happens to be a vegetarian like my son, her journey was a source of inspiration for him. While it didn’t entirely answer his question, it helped him see that people like him can achieve greatness in athletics.

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Defunding Libraries Remains a Legal Threat

SHE LIT: Defunding Libraries Remains a Legal Threat 🏛️ Missouri lawmakers vote to defund the state’s libraries while others vow to reverse action. Plus, Brittney Griner plans to release a new memoir.

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#currentlyreading Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell

Missouri House votes to defund libraries as Senate plans to add money back to budget


News broke last week that Missouri’s state House had passed a budget to stop using taxpayer dollars to fund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at health care facilities and educational institutions. What was buried in the proposed budget was that the 160 library districts in Missouri would lose $4.5 million in funding.


It comes down to a lawsuit filed by the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association to declare that the Missouri Revised Statute §573.550 is unconstitutional. The statute says anyone in an official position at a school such as a librarian or teacher distributing “explicit sexual material” to children will be charged with a misdemeanor.


The librarians filed Missouri Association of School Librarians v. Baker in Jackson County Circuit Court against the state’s prosecuting attorneys because they felt they had to take legal action against legislators to protect themselves.


In retaliation, the House Republicans decided to not give public libraries their funding in fear that the money would be spent on the legal costs surrounding the lawsuit. The Missouri ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs.


The American Civil Liberties Union and its offices across the country are working pro bono on litigation focused on banned books. That means the libraries were going to be defunded over a falsehood that funding would go to legal fees.


The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee in Missouri said the $4.5 million will be added back into the state budget for libraries.


In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned the Texas federal judge who ordered 12 books to be returned to the shelves of the Llano County public libraries. A lawsuit that was filed by a group of residents concerned over the removal still had to play out in court.


It’s usually routine for a judge to make an order like this to ensure fairness during the length of an ongoing lawsuit. But on Thursday, the county commissioners held a special meeting to decide whether to close the county’s library system. The libraries will remain open — for now.


Back in September, I mentioned how Patmos Library in Michigan was defunded by voters who rejected a measure to fund the library over concerns of LGBTQIA+ books that weren’t even on its shelves. The news went viral, and the library was able to push back its closure with $100,000 donated by residents.


Legal actions in the form of lawsuits, bills, and measures can erase money for publicly funded libraries. These actions are being raised over a handful of books, some of these books are marketed toward children while others are for adults. Either way, the personal control of borrowing a book from the library is being undermined by the day.

Check out past newsletters!

What we’re highlighting


Celebrities join forces for #LetAmericaRead campaign


Julia Roberts, Connie Britton, Selma Blair, and Shonda Rhimes are a few of the famous faces coming together to support the #LetAmericaRead campaign in response to the banned books movement. Social media users can snap selfies with their favorite banned books and add the hashtag to their posts to show support.

What we’re reviewing

What We Learn About Brittney Griner in Her First Memoir


Basketball star Brittney Griner will be releasing a new memoir next year about her 10-month detention in a Russian prison. The release of this book will coincide with the 10th anniversary of her first memoir In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court. As the first memoir highlights the moments leading up to her newfound stardom, the second memoir will focus on the transition of becoming an unexpected political prisoner and activist.


“Readers will hear my story and understand why I’m so thankful for the outpouring of support from people across the world,” Brittney said in a press release about the memoir. “By writing this book, I also hope to raise awareness surrounding other Americans wrongfully detained abroad such as Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, Emad Shargi, Airan Berry, Shahab Dalili, Luke Denman, Eyvin Hernandez, Majd Kamalmaz, Jerrel Kenemore, Kai Li, Siamak Namazi, Austin Tice, Mark Swidan and Morad Tahbaz.”


Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, is the publisher behind the untitled memoir. The news was announced amid the WNBA draft where University of South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston was the No. 1 pick and more than a week after Brittney’s former Baylor University coach Kim Mulkey won her first championship with the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team.


While Brittney spends 2023 revving up on the court, her memoir will sure make a splash when it comes out in spring 2024 as we get rare insight into her experience as a Black gay female athlete navigating various politics in order to win back her freedom.

Read the entire blog post here

What we’re watching

Tiny Beautiful Things on Hulu from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine takes the best-selling collection by acclaimed Wild memoirist Cheryl Strayed and brings in Kathryn Hahn to play a struggling writer who writes an advice column while her life is falling apart. The book is based on the author’s time writing the “Dear Sugar” advice column for The Rumpus.

What the plans are


The San Antonio Book Festival is on Saturday, April 15, at the city’s Central Library. Sandra Cisneros, Mahogany L. Browne, Melissa de la Cruz, and Rebecca Makkai are expected to be there.


The Get Lit! Festival will be held from Thursday, April 20 to Sunday, April 23, on the campus of Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington. U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón will be a festival headliner.


Unbound Book Festival also takes place from April 20-23 in Columbia, Missouri. Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal will be the keynote authors.

Where the opportunities are


Poets & Writers Inc. is looking for a full-time assistant editor based in New York City who can provide editorial support for the Poets & Writers Magazine and its website.


Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica, California, needs a store manager to manage daily operations of the bookstore, including customer service, inventory, and event oversight.


Jump! Inc. in Minneapolis has an opening for a senior editor to develop titles across its children’s nonfiction publishing list, including managing authors and editing manuscripts.

“History is clear: Good ideas are strengthened through contest, as governments are through debate. Since time immemorial, book banning has been the refuge of leaders who fear that their arguments and writs cannot withstand scrutiny. Its violence is born of weakness. And we are not a weak people — fighting book bans is an act of patriotism and a show of strength.” – Julianna Margulies on joining the #LetAmericaRead campaign

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What We Learn About Brittney Griner in Her First Memoir

Basketball star Brittney Griner will be releasing a new memoir next year about her 10-month detention in a Russian prison. The release of this book will coincide with the 10th anniversary of her first memoir In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court. As the first memoir highlights the moments leading up to her newfound stardom, the second memoir will focus on the transition of becoming an unexpected political prisoner and activist.

“Readers will hear my story and understand why I’m so thankful for the outpouring of support from people across the world,” Brittney said in a press release about the memoir. “By writing this book, I also hope to raise awareness surrounding other Americans wrongfully detained abroad such as Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, Emad Shargi, Airan Berry, Shahab Dalili, Luke Denman, Eyvin Hernandez, Majd Kamalmaz, Jerrel Kenemore, Kai Li, Siamak Namazi, Austin Tice, Mark Swidan and Morad Tahbaz.”

Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, is the publisher behind the untitled memoir. The news was announced amid the WNBA draft where University of South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston was the No. 1 pick and more than a week after Brittney’s former Baylor University coach Kim Mulkey won her first championship with the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team.

While Brittney spends 2023 revving up on the court, her memoir will sure make a splash when it comes out in spring 2024 as we get rare insight into her experience as a Black gay female athlete navigating various politics in order to win back her freedom.

Pay inequity, cannabis overregulation lead to arrest

Brittney, the No. 1 WNBA draft pick in 2013, was arrested in Russia in February 2022 over charges of carrying cannabis cartridges in her luggage as she tried to fly back to the U.S. after finishing a season playing with the Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg. She played overseas, like a lot of her WNBA colleagues from Candace Parker to Maya Moore, because players’ salaries average $117,500 to $215,000, according to Spotrac.

On the list, Brittney’s WNBA base salary ranks at $165,100 this year as the No. 35 top paid player, a drop in standing due to her imprisonment. The No. 35 NBA player is Deandre Ayton of the Phoenix Suns, the same city as Brittney, and ESPN reports he is earning almost $31 million this season. Though WNBA salaries increased after fans voiced concern over the reason why Brittney was playing overseas, WNBA salaries are still nowhere near NBA salaries.

Her arrest also became controversial in the court of public opinion as she brought an illegal drug into Russia, where cannabis possession translated into a nine-year prison sentence. Though she helped the country elevate its basketball game, none of that mattered amid President Vladimir Putin’s administration waging a war with neighboring Ukraine.

Russia launched its first attack against the former Soviet Union republic of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Brittney was arrested the week before on Feb. 17.

She became a political prisoner as the Biden administration went back and forth on negotiations to bring Brittney, known as BG by her friends and fans, back to the U.S. safe and sound. She came home last December after the U.S. traded her with Russia for an infamous arms dealer.

What she entails in her post-imprisonment memoir will become media fodder with Oprah Winfrey-level interviews and a constant replay of excerpts. Brittney co-wrote her memoir in 2014 with Sue Hovey, a former vice president and executive editor at ESPN, a year after joining the WNBA.

The first memoir, published by HarperCollins, detailed her upbringing in Texas, particularly around growing into her sexuality. She was raised by a father, who worked in law enforcement and lived by the law at home. Her mother seemed supportive but couldn’t protect Brittney from her father’s ignorance about how she was developing.

Living under her father’s strict roof made playing basketball at Baylor, a private Baptist university, just as difficult after she left home. She writes about her experiences of dealing with her father and college coach in the book:

“I was finally coming into my own as an adult, but before I could step forward and be exactly the person I wanted to be in public, before I could say and do the things I wanted to do, on my own terms, I had to go through some serious growing pains with the two main authority figures in my life: my dad, Raymond Griner, and my coach, Kim Mulkey.

“I love and respect them both, more than they probably know. But if I had to pick just one word to describe my relationship with each of them? Complicated. All caps COMPLICATED.”

Tension with father, coach over sexuality

Kim was the Baylor coach for 21 years. In her book, Brittney writes about how their relationship deteriorated because she felt her coach showed two faces — one for the public, one for private.

“She would call me into her office to tell me I had done something wrong — like when someone saw me kissing my girlfriend at the movies — but then she would shift the burden away from herself, trying to imply she was just the messenger and this wasn’t how she personally felt. Those conversations caused me a lot of confusion, a lot of pain.”

Amid this year’s March Madness, the championship-winning coach told ESPN she had not talked to her former player since Brittney returned from Russia. To be fair, Kim was busy coaching her team to its first national title while Brittney had just re-signed with the Phoenix Mercury.

Brittney says she had “a lot of mixed emotions” about her time at Baylor, which is located in Waco, Texas. Though she was close to home and her talent was supported on campus, the university had a policy against same-sex romantic relationships, an issue she nor her family were aware of before her enrollment.

Attending a religious school against her sexual identity ties into her time in high school, where she realized she liked girls. At home, she says her father had his own similar policy.

“There was a bit of a cold war going on between us, but I knew our relationship would become red hot if he discovered the truth about my sexuality,” she writes. “I knew if he found out, the walls would come crashing down around me. My dad has always had a very narrow view of the world, perceiving anything ‘different’ as a threat.”

Though she had a simple coming-out discussion with her mother, Brittney says she was warned to not tell her father. She says her father would say passive-aggressive statements like wondering how Kim and Baylor would react to her “being so friendly with gays.”

The relationship Brittney had with these two authoritative figures really impacted how she wanted to live in the world as a gay woman. Her intersectionality also came up with her arrest. Russia is considered to have harsh laws against same-sex relationships. We should see correlations between how she was treated in the U.S. for her identity and how she was treated in Russia as an athlete-turned-prisoner.

It begs the question how her relationship with her father has changed with her high-profile arrest since part of her identity is growing up as a daughter of a police officer. She even once had the same career ambitions to follow in law enforcement.

Also, being Black (and tattooed) as a prisoner in a country that is less than 1% Black added fuel to the fire. When Brittney returned home, she was sporting a short cropped hairdo because she had to sever her trademark locs due to the freezing temperatures in Russia. Her upcoming memoir may go in depth on her feelings about her identity being affected by the erasure of her African hairstyle.

Fame & basketball

Since she was 23 at the time of the first memoir’s release, Brittney was still young enough to dedicate the majority of the book on her coming of age in Houston.

Like many teenagers, Brittney suffered from depression, not quite understanding the toll. She writes about how she was bullied for being tall and wanting to dress in clothes considered appropriate for boys.

“They were constantly making fun of how I looked and dressed, how I walked and talked,” she writes. “I’m not sure I can express exactly how I felt in those moments, because I usually went numb. When you’re on the receiving end of insults every day, they chip away at your self-esteem.”

With her 6’8 height, Brittney started playing basketball in high school, which is almost considered a late bloomer for anyone serious about pursuing the sport seriously in college and beyond.

“The growing confidence I felt off the court carried over to basketball. And the more I improved as a player, the better I felt about the person I was becoming,” she writes. “It all just fed on itself. After fighting and struggling my way through middle school, I now had a new sense of purpose.”

As she became a basketball megastar at Baylor, her sexuality and gender were questioned with higher intensity at the university.

“We could acknowledge, in a general way, that people were questioning my gender, calling me a freak, a man, a female impostor. And yet I couldn’t talk about being gay,” she writes. “Most of the time, I was on autopilot with the media, because I couldn’t really show who I was of the often portrayed—just a big, fun-loving, goofy kid—felt like a two-dimensional version of the real me.”

In the book, Brittney writes about her time playing on the Zhejiang Chouzhou Golden Bulls in China while on break from playing on the Phoenix Mercury, the team she signed with in 2013. She describes how normal it is for WNBA players to play overseas to earn close to equivalent salaries of NBA players. Though she is a two-time Olympic gold medalist for Team USA, she still had to play in Russia, which ultimately led to her arrest.

Regardless of the controversy around her arrest and release, readers may be interested in her captivity in a strict foreign prison as a gay Black female celebrity and how that experience led to the evolution of her speaking up for Americans also imprisoned under trumped-up charges abroad.

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The High Cost of Supporting Marginalized Authors

SHE LIT: The High Cost of Supporting Marginalized Authors ⚖️

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#currentlyreading Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love by Michelle Miller

DiverseVoices folds under pressure to ease barriers for underrepresented creators


We have lost a literary nonprofit organization dedicated to making sure more authors across diverse backgrounds enter the tough publishing market.


DiverseVoices Inc. has closed its doors online, according to an email and social media messages sent out last Friday. Founded in 2019 by Beth Phelan of the Gallt & Zacker Literary Agency, the organization aspired “to empower and advocate for minority, underrepresented and other marginalized groups of writers, illustrators and other book creators.”


It rose from #DVPit, one of the more popular hashtag campaigns used on Twitter by aspiring writers from underrepresented groups pitching their stories in 280 characters or less for literary agents to take notice.


#DVPit will live on, but the organization that blossomed from it seems to have fallen prey to the excess work necessary to diversify the publishing industry. DiverseVoices mainly connected mentors, the established book creators, with mentees, the aspiring book creators, to guide them through the industry-standard labyrinth of editing and preparing manuscripts to querying and signing with agents in the long game to get their books published.


“i’m really sorry, yall. it’s been an honor serving the community but it was not sustainable for me. i’m heartbroken,” Beth tweeted in the announcement.


DiverseVoices says it had “insufficient resources necessary to sustain the organization.” The website alone, which expires next week, probably cost hundreds of dollars to be hosted online. The organization’s remaining funds will go to its more successful counterparts We Need Diverse Books and Our Voice Alliance.


All of its programs will cease, but YouTube videos will still be available. #DVPit has its own website. The 2023 dates for the pitch party have not been posted yet.


It’s unfortunate an organization dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices will have to fold so soon. Though it was in existence for four years, that is not enough time to have seen its maximum potential, especially when you throw a yearslong pandemic in the mix.


The country is currently in a chokehold over banned books in spaces children frequent, so the need to ensure all serious authors are getting a fair shot to have their voices heard through their writing is more crucial than ever. Hopefully, other similar organizations can survive these trying times of financing support for authors who historically never received it.


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What we’re highlighting


Texas court orders books to be returned to library shelves


A Texas federal court ordered last week the return of at least 12 books taken off shelves in Llano County public libraries, according to multiple media reports. Last year, a group of residents sued county officials over the removal of the books, including thousands of digital copies. On March 30, a judge with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio said those books need to be returned to shelves and no others can be removed while the case remains ongoing.


D.C. bookstore employees follow competitor to unionize


Solid State Books is the latest bookstore to see employees join the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400 Union. The Black-owned independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., is the second local bookstore to unionize in recent months. Competitor Politics and Prose Bookstore unionized last September.


Here are some April book club picks:

Also what’s lit…


Noname Book Club canceled last month’s meetups across the country for its monthly selection The Temple of My Familiar after Alice Walker defended J.K. Rowling over her transphobic remarks.


White Lotus actor Will Sharpe plans to direct the film adaptation of Crying in H Mart based on the best-selling and award-winning memoir by Michelle Zauner, who’s also the lead singer of the indie pop band Japanese Breakfast.


Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest novel Carrie Soto Is Back will be getting a film adaptation in partnership with independent film producer Picturestart.


Original Pink Power Ranger actress Amy Jo Johnson is writing her own version of a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers comic book series with publisher Boom Studios as the franchise celebrates 30 years.

What we’re reviewing

‘Bel-Air’ Shows How a Black Teacher Could Be Punished for Expanding Book Access

‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ Stars Karyn Parsons and Daphne Maxwell Reid Talk Writing Life

Book Festivals Highlight Diverse Works Amid Banned Books Movement

What we’re watching

The Australian TV series Wellmania has soared to the top of Netflix’s top 10 list. The half-hour dramedy follows a New York journalist who flies home to Australia to surprise her best friend who’s turning 40 but becomes sick enough from her everyday habits that she fails to get a green card to fly back to the U.S. The story is based on Brigid Delaney’s memoir of the same name.

What the plans are

The 11th annual Black Comic Book Festival on April 14-15 invites enthusiasts of Black comic books and graphic novels for panel discussions, workshops, and cosplay showcases at the Schomburg Center in New York City.

The Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival will be held in-person and virtually on April 12-14 at the University of Southern Mississippi campus in Hattiesburg with discussions on the latest trends in kidlit.

Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the self-proclaimed first publisher in North America devoted to publishing works by women of color, is marking on April 20 the 40th anniversary of its 1983 title Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.

Where the opportunities are

Rebel Girls is seeking a managing editor to work on a growing list of titles from anthologies to guide books aimed at girls ages 0 to 14 and their parents.

The Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship is accepting applications until April 10 for its yearlong program designed to give an emerging adult fiction, nonfiction, or poetry writer from an underrepresented community additional resources to make writing a career.

“What’s going on is unbelievable. It’s crazy and scary. It is coming from our government, lawmakers drunk with power with a need to control everything. Sure, it’s still sexuality — but it’s gender, it’s LGBTQ+, it’s racism. It’s history itself that’s under fire.” – Judy Blume at Variety’s Power of Women lunch on April 4 in New York

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‘Bel-Air’ Shows How a Black Teacher Could Be Punished for Expanding Book Access

"Compromised" Episode 203 -- Pictured: (l-r) Akira Akbar as Ashley, Tatyana Ali as Ms. Hughes -- (Photo by: PEACOCK)

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Watch the series on Peacock.

Peacock’s Bel-Air not only united the original Ashley Banks with the new Ashley Banks, but the reboot drama united them in a storyline highlighting the near erasure of Black literature in the classroom.

The show is a serious portrayal of the 1990s NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that brought rapper Will Smith to the silver screen. The new version stars Jabari Banks, who has an uncanny resemblance to Will and holds the fictional last name of the TV family in real life. It’s still the same story of a Black teen boy from West Philadelphia who must move to the upscale Los Angeles enclave of Bel-Air with his aunt and her immediate family to stay out of trouble. 

Tatyana Ali, who played Ashley in the sitcom, made a guest appearance in the second season of Bel-Air by playing teacher Ms. Hughes to the reimagined version of her former character Ashley, played by Akira Akbar. 

At the elite Bel-Air Academy, Ms. Hughes gives Ashley a book, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, by Robyn C. Spencer, in the premiere episode “A Fresh Start.” Ms. Hughes asks for a two-page summary, which is an extra credit assignment since the book is outside of the curriculum. 

In the second episode “Speaking Truth,” Ms. Hughes hands Ashley another book after class. This time, it’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. A White classmate glares at their exchange in the background. The look of disgust on the classmate’s face shows the concern that Ms. Hughes is showing Ashley more preference because they’re both Black. Soon, we learn a complaint has been filed against Ms. Hughes. And it’s not the first.

When Ashley later bumps into Ms. Hughes in the hallway with a box of her effects inside, she asks why the teacher is leaving. Ms. Hughes gives Ashley words of encouragement, but Ashley is obviously devastated that her favorite teacher, one of the very few Black teachers in the school, is gone. 

Ashley tells her parents Vivian, played by Cassandra Freeman, and Phil, played by Adrian Holmes, about Ms. Hughes’ firing. They discover that Ms. Hughes was let go over providing books outside of the approved curriculum at a parent advisory committee meeting. Vivian even lists the authors Ashley is now exposed to because of Ms. Hughes’ influence, such as James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Paula Giddings.

Will, Ashley’s cousin, and Carlton, Ashley’s brother played by Olly Sholotan, get involved by bringing the issue to the high school’s Black Student Union in an effort to keep Carlton elected as class president by maintaining the Black student vote. A protest comes up as the best response to Ms. Hughes’ firing. Except Carlton has a chance to win the school’s highest student award and be the first Black student to win the award. The BSU adviser, who is Black, dissuades Carlton to plan the protest; it’s not worth sacrificing the award over a fired teacher who wasn’t following the rules. 

The third episode “Compromise” shows the BSU dealing with the administration’s threat to suspend them all if members and allies walk out during classes. Then Carlton and BSU president strike a deal with the administration: Students can walk out but can’t make speeches or hold signs. The middle school students like Ashley are already barred from participating in the walkout. 

On the day of the walkout at 11 a.m., Carlton leads participating students to the quad in protest of not only Ms. Hughes being fired but also in support for a more inclusive curriculum. The pressure to go against the compromise made with the administration revs up Carlton’s anxiety. Will says he has Carlton’s back as he takes a large sign and runs up staircases to end up on the roof. He unrolls a sign that reads “Black Teachers Matter.” With a raised fist, he starts the chant “Black Teachers Matter.” Students below join in the chant. 

According to Tatyana’s Instagram post, this episode is her last appearance, so the Ms. Hughes storyline may end there. But how students are walking out in protest over demanding inclusive curricula is an example of art imitating life. 

Students in Virginia walked out last fall due to Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transgender student policies. Last month, students across Florida walked out to protest Governor Ron DeSantis’ plans to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at colleges and universities. 

At the root of the issue in Bel-Air is that a Black female teacher mentored a Black female student by giving her books that would never be read in the classroom or approved for a syllabus at a predominantly White upper-crust school. But the mentorship was severed by complaints from other classmates not getting the same attention. 

To be fair, unfairness should be reported in situations like classroom settings where teacher favoritism could affect your grades, but that part of the conversation is not discussed. The repercussions of firing a Black teacher over providing Black stories go deeper with dismantling a literary mentorship that had already opened a student’s mind.

One in five Black or African American private school teachers worked at schools with less than 25% enrollment of students of color, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That shows how rare a relationship is between a Black teacher and a Black student at a predominantly White private school. 

Out of 3,420 children’s books in 2021, 36% were “books by and about Black, Indigenous and People of Color,” per data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison. As books by authors of color seem to see higher rates of bans and attempts at bans, students of all backgrounds may not know about those books if they’re not available to them at school or the public library. Hence, Ms. Hughes giving Ashley books on the side to read that explore the experiences and identities of people of African descent is viewed as an act of defiance.

Although the storyline is rooted in students demanding a more inclusive curriculum, the issue of approved literature impacts many educators who are currently witnessing conflicts with some of their local and state regulators restricting what is taught in classrooms. 

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After Years of Revisions, a Writing Win

SHE LIT: After Years of Revisions, a Writing Win🏆

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It’s Women’s History Month every day here.

After winning a literary contest, how do you prepare to promote yourself as an author?

Ringing in Women’s History Month with my own personal historical achievement: I won in the middle grade/young adult category for the Black Creatives Revisions Workshop.

The program was sponsored by literary advocacy organization We Need Diverse Books and mega-publisher Penguin Random House. After years of submitting stories to fellowships, I finally nabbed a fellowship and won the grand prize!

The workshop lasted four months in 2022 from May to September. My cohort and I submitted our revised manuscripts to Penguin Random House at the end. The application required a completed draft manuscript, as the main focus of the workshop was to prep that manuscript for publication.

While spending those months on trying to perfect my story to the best of my ability, I got married, left a job, started a job, and brainstormed my next idea for a novel.

My manuscript now is being considered for publication at Penguin Random House. The workshop, like many other opportunities, doesn’t guarantee a publishing contract, but I feel much closer to one. I’m still querying literary agents. I have to keep writing because luckily my story ideas keep overflowing like a waterfall.

Though I had submitted to programs in the past, I plan to rev up submissions for short story prizes. Once this thought entered my mind, I noticed Kima Jones post an informational reel about submitting short stories and keeping track of those stories. She is a veteran on these matters: She won the PEN America fellowship in 2013 and created her own retreat with Jack Jones Literary Arts. Her memoir, Butch, is expected to be released this fall.

Boosting yourself up as a future author is hard. You have to be strategic, like amassing thousands of social media followers, a requirement for some literary agents. You have to figure out a media brand when you don’t have a book out in the world. As a journalist, I have hundreds of articles under my byline, but a book is a different beast.

For the same manuscript in a rougher form, I also had the honor to be longlisted by the inaugural Voyage YA First Chapters contest. I didn’t boast about that honor because of the longlisting. I wanted to win the top prizes, but reflecting back, I still should’ve hurrahed louder for the fact my work was recognized.

This blog has given me great insight into the publishing industry. I started the blog after realizing that I had a lot of work to do to become a traditionally published author. Even authors who self-publish still have to research the best ways to get their books distributed and learn how to promote themselves and their books. Those are just the basics.

Most people who have creative writing passion knew that to make a living, they needed a day job. Fortunately, I always dreamed of being a journalist, too, and that dream felt more attainable. Living the multipassionate life is a struggle, but when you imagine yourself as an author, all those actions you have to take become more visible. And it’s nice when your work also becomes more visible.

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What we’re highlighting

Women are publishing more books than men, study finds

Women published only a third as many books as men in 1970, but by 2020, women produced the majority of books, according to a Quartz article. The findings are from Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota, who also noted that female-authored books seem to be just as enjoyable to consumers as male-authored books.

Earliest known author may have been a Mesopotamian woman

The texts of a priestess named Enheduanna from 5,000 years ago seem to be the first texts found to have been written in first person. The work was discovered in 1927 by British archeologists, but historians didn’t believe the woman from the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia, now a part of modern-day Iraq, wrote the texts. Scholars now insist that she is the writer, beating out Homer by a millennium.

Older female authors are being sought out by publishers

Women in their 50, 60s, 70s, and 80s are getting their books published more in recent years, per an article in The Guardian. The reason: More readers are valuing the experiences and voices of older women. And publishers are noticing the “collected, distilled wisdom” of women over 45 means a “lifetime of reading and radicalism that is not possible for younger writers.”

Here are some March book club picks:

Also what’s lit…

Marketing maven Bozoma Saint John marked the release day for her memoir The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival by ringing the bell at Nasdaq.

Luckiest Girl Alive author and screenwriter Jessica Knoll talks the importance of preordering books while promoting her third novel Bright Young Women.

Nic Stone is celebrating the release of her 13th book, which is her original “shelved” novel, now out as Chaos Theory.

Huda Fahmy, the author behind the popular graphic novel Huda F Are You?, has a forthcoming sequel Huda F Cares? about the title character’s Muslim family road-tripping to Disney World.

Singer and book club celebrity Amerie shared details about her debut picture book You Will Do Great Things on TalkShop.live.

What we’re reviewing

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House Transports You Back to the Time of ‘Little Women’

‘Joy Luck Club’ Author Amy Tan Shares How Her Work Became an ‘Unintended Memoir’

How Erica Kennedy Defined 2000s Multicultural Women’s Fiction

Book Review: ‘Shine Bright’ by Danyel Smith

Book Review: ‘On Her Own Ground’ by A’Lelia Bundles

What we’re watching

Daisy Jones & the Six premieres today on Amazon Prime Video. The adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel centers on a 1970s Fleetwood Mac-like rock band. With book club celebrity and book-to-TV producer Reese Witherspoon behind the scenes, the miniseries stars Riley Keough of the Presley dynasty as lead singer Daisy as she embarks on a trip with her band to worldwide fame. The fictional band’s album is also streaming on Spotify.

What the plans are

Tucson Festival of Books takes place this weekend on the University of Arizona campus. Expect to see authors like Jemele Hill, Angie Cruz, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, with a Sunday appearance by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Southwest Florida Reading Festival at the Fort Myers Regional Library also happens this Saturday, featuring authors Alka Joshi, Kalynn Bayron, and Meg Medina.

North Texas Teen Book Festival starts today and continues tomorrow at the Irvington Convention Center. Fellow panelists and Whiteout co-authors Angie Thomas, Dhonielle Clayton, and Nic Stone join a roster of other middle grade and young adult writers.

Where the opportunities are

Milkweed Editions needs an advancement director to help the indie press with its fundraising campaigns.

Chronicle Books is hiring three early-career designers for its design fellowship program to focus on books and gifts.

Voyage YA is looking for young adult short story and poetry submissions for its second anthology.

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Black Characters in Children’s Literature Are Disappearing as Schools Limit History Courses

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Searching for books by Black female authors this month? Take a look at authors we’ve featured

Black characters in children’s literature are disappearing as schools limit history courses

In mid-January, two weeks before Black History Month, the Florida Department of Education rejected the new A.P. African American Studies course. The state agency claimed the content “significantly lacks educational value.” Earlier this month, the College Board announced it revised the Advanced Placement course, making parts of the curriculum optional like those that touch on intersectionality and contemporary issues.

How the precollegiate course was trimmed down over complaints of alleged untruths became part of the bigger conversation: Black children being impacted by the removal of instructional materials that show people who look like them.

More books focused on accurate U.S. history and featuring Black characters are being banned nearly every day across the country. The stakes are higher, with the rise in legislation such as Florida’s Stop WOKE Act and bills to ban books with “sexually explicit” content. These efforts impact all children, but Black children are seeing a higher impact with not being able to see themselves in books that have been on shelves for years and generations because a parent filed a complaint about revisionist history and inappropriate references.

There was a 306% increase in Black main characters on the front book covers of children’s best-sellers between 2012 and 2020. But by 2021, a year after the Black Lives Matter movement was spurred by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black characters had been disappearing, with a 23% decline in children’s best-sellers having a Black main character.

This data is from WordsRated, a research data and analytics group. The group also recognized 2020 as the first year that Black characters outnumbered White characters on the front covers of children’s best-sellers. But these are books that had already been approved for publication a year or two earlier.

Yet there was a decline as the attention on the Black Lives Matter movement declined, WordsRated finds. In 2020, at the height of the movement, many literary agents said they would prioritize works queried by Black aspiring authors in the name of social justice. It’s not clear if enough of a new crop of traditionally published Black authors have emerged as beneficiaries to these industry promises.

Book bans multiplied by schools cutting Black history curricula means children are not given the full picture. And families may struggle to fill those gaps when parents and guardians work during the day. Some families are going out of their way to buy banned books to make these books featuring Black characters best-sellers. We saw this phenomenon last year with the astronomical sales of Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas used it in a presentation in Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings.

Still, the domino effect always comes back to the freedom to read and learn beyond biased interpretations. There is hope we’ll see Black main characters in more books once fresher data is available.

Black History Month is a time to reflect on the contributions of people of African descent in the U.S. More than ever, their creative and artistic contributions are being hidden from children who may not seek the knowledge later in life if they’re not exposed to the information in the first place. Here’s a video from Black Miami Dade that talks about how a group of Black teachers wrote a book to ensure Black history entered and remained in their classrooms.

Check out past newsletters!

What we’re highlighting

HarperCollins and union end monthslong strike

The largest New York unionized book publisher and its union have come to an agreement to end a three-month strike. The union, which represents around 250 members, will head back to the office after the Presidents’ Day weekend. With a major demand being higher pay, employees will soon earn an annual starting pay of $47,500 that will rise to $50,000 by 2025. The strike inspired Hachette and Macmillan to announce similar changes.

Black queer authors score 7-figure book deal

All Boys Aren’t Blue memoirist George M. Johnson and You Should See Me In a Crown novelist Leah Johnson have negotiated an undisclosed book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux Books for Young Readers, a Macmillan imprint. The authors, who are not related, will write a romantic series starting with There’s Always Next Year in 2025. The story focuses on two cousins trying to improve their romantic and social lives around New Year’s.

Two women-owned bookstores open doors in LA

Named after science fiction novelist Octavia E. Butler, Octavia’s Bookshelf is the newest Black woman-owned bookstore in the Los Angeles area. Nikki High, the owner and founder, grew up in Altadena and wanted to have a bookstore in nearby Pasadena, Octavia’s hometown. The store will open on Feb. 18, the same day as the much-anticipated Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica. With Manhattan literary socialite Zibby Owens at the helm, the bookstore will have a two-day festival starring authors such as biographer Anna Malaika Tubbs and her husband and former Stockton, California, mayor Michael Tubbs; Dirty Dancing actress Jennifer Grey, Younger creator Pamela Redmon, and Luckiest Girl Alive writer Jessica Knoll.

Also what’s lit…

Viola Davis reached EGOT status when she won a Grammy Award in the Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album category for the audiobook narration of her memoir Finding Me.

Hillman Grad Books unveiled its forthcoming titles in partnership with Zando Projects.

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Garcelle Beauvais reveals production on the book-to-TV adaptation of The Other Black Girl has wrapped.

Actress-activist Kerry Washington plans to share her ups and downs in Hollywood in her upcoming memoir Thicker Than Water.

The first Black Bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay Abasolo, unboxed copies of her second book, a romance novel.

The Afro-Minimalist’s Guide to Living With Less author Christine Platt will have a new kidlit chapter series centered on a Black girl journalist.

What we’re reviewing

‘Wildblood’ Writer Lauren Blackwood Brings Magic to the Jamaican Jungle in Historical Fantasy Novel

How the Introverted Black Writer Girl Became Visible in ‘Poetic Justice’

How Lisa Turtle Was ‘Slighted’ As a Black Teen Girl TV Character

Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles Holds Launch Party in Slauson Community

Well-Read Black Girl Founder Glory Edim On ‘Cultivating Joy’ In Her Growing Book Club

What we’re watching

Not Dead Yet is a new ABC half-hour comedy on Wednesdays (Thursdays on Hulu) starring Gina Rodriguez as a down-on-her-luck journalist who sees dead people while writing obituaries for her local newspaper. It’s loosely based on the British novel Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up by Alexandra Potter.

What the plans are

PEN America and the NYC Literary Action Coalition is hosting the Literary Activism Summit on Feb. 25 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

The Savannah Book Festival in Georgia will take place on Feb. 16-19 featuring authors like Nina LaCour, Katie Gutierrez, and Gayle Jessup White.

Noname Book Club will end the month with its book club picks hosting several meetings across the country from Feb. 22-28.

Where the opportunities are

Feminist Press is looking for an executive and program assistant who can help with the administrative needs of the mission-driven feminist publishing company.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation welcomes submissions in literary nonfiction for its Crossover Award honoring unpublished Black writers.

Liveright Publishing, a W.W. Norton & Company imprint working with authors Glory Edim, Mahogany Browne, and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, needs a publicity manager with knowledge of promoting nonfiction and literary fiction works.

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Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

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‘Wildblood’ Writer Lauren Blackwood Brings Magic to the Jamaican Jungle in Historical Fantasy Novel

⚠️ Trigger warning! The story and the post below mention sexual assault.

Following the success of Within These Wicked Walls, Lauren Blackwood returns with another vibrant story, this time set in a magical Jamaican jungle.

Wildblood, which is out now from Macmillan’s Wednesday Books, takes us to the late 19th century and builds a unique story that serves as an extraordinary sophomore novel after weaving the thread of the Charlotte Brontë classic Jane Eyre into an Ethiopian retelling with her debut novel. Within These Wicked Walls earned the recognition of being a Reese’s Book Club Fall 2021 YA Pick.

The new young adult book centers on Victoria, an 18-year-old woman who was kidnapped at a young age and forced to serve as a guide within a tourist company that specializes in venturing into the jungle. Except the jungle has creatures that could be dangerous to mortals such as spirits that can snatch souls without remorse. Victoria is a Wildblood, meaning she has the magic to communicate with the creatures and, in her professional standing, can ensure the safety of tourists.

When a well-known Black gold miner named Laertes Thorn becomes a client with his rather large party, Victoria is tasked with her fellow Wildbloods to bring these foreigners to a mountain allegedly full of gold. The gold is a legend since survivors have never exited the jungle to tell the story of reaching the treasures.

On the trip like back at home, Victoria tries to remain a motherly figure to Bunny, a young Wildblood who cannot control his magic, and a girlfriend to Samson, a Wildblood who was kidnapped by the company after her. But new emotions arise as she finds herself falling for Thorn and battling her former love Dean, the main Wildblood in charge who seems like he’ll do anything to keep their abusive boss happy like saying yes to such a dangerous trip.

The fight for survival underlies the story that places Victoria in a spot where she’s trying to understand love from different angles and trust in her inherent magic.

Author Lauren Blackwood talks to she lit about how she came up with the story and the art of making sure the characters, the plot, and the tension remain engaging until the very end. Check out the conversation below:

she lit: The story’s main character, Victoria, is a Wildblood who possesses the magic to communicate with the precarious jungle. Her touring company kidnapped her at a young age to take advantage of her magic. How did you come up with this story and figure out how to convey the difficult subject of abuse?

Lauren Blackwood: I wanted to write a book about a girl finding her strength. Anytime I portray an issue or trauma I want it to be done sensitively and respectfully, but also honestly. I don’t think showing SA* on page is ever necessary—there are ways to get the message across without that type of triggering imagery. So with that in mind, I then let Victoria guide her own journey on the path that felt right for her. 

she lit: While on the dangerous tour, Victoria finds herself tangled in a love cube with her partner Samson, her ex Dean, and her new client Thorn. Can you describe your writing experience with creating the tension between these characters?

Lauren Blackwood: You’re the first one to ever describe their situation as a love cube, haha! Writing relationships is my favorite thing, and I purposely wanted to use this book to explore different kinds of love. But I think the issue is that all three boys have different intentions for Victoria, which puts them in conflict with each other and with Victoria herself, who’s really just learning to live her life on her own terms.

Photo Credit: Terri LaShae

she lit: Victoria takes it upon herself to be a mother figure to Bunny, a younger Wildblood who rages with his magic. How would you describe this source of love for Victoria as a counterbalance to the love she’s getting from Samson and Thorn?

Lauren Blackwood: Victoria’s relationship with Bunny is more of that of a mother and child—she’s extremely protective of him, which is a love he doesn’t necessarily appreciate. It’s the opposite of her relationship with Samson, who in his own loving way tries to look out for her but ends up being a bit overbearing. So you have those two opposites of the spectrum, and then you have Thorn, who sits right in the middle. They have mutual respect and love for each other, and they don’t doubt each others’ abilities but look out for each other equally.

she lit: Greed is an overwhelming theme with Thorn and his team endangering their lives to mine gold in the Gilded Orchard that has never been mined by survivors. Can you explain the historical significance of making the team members Black and their desire to gain riches before the turn of the 20th century?

Lauren Blackwood: If you’ve read my debut Within These Wicked Walls, you’ll know I love writing about wealthy Black guys who have the freedom to do as they please. I suppose the historical significance is that when Black people owned business, all the staff would be Black because they weren’t welcome in white spaces—whatever business ventures white people were up to, Black people were usually doing it too and just not getting any credit for it. But honestly, I just wanted to write about Black people, regardless of history.

she lit: The book’s cover is vibrant, featuring Victoria in the jungle. Victoria looks a lot like you. How much input did you have in the cover design and the way the character is portrayed on the cover?

Lauren Blackwood: I wanted to write a character who looks like me (who’s Jamaican like me) because growing up there were never any fantasy novels about girls who shared my heritage. So, the only thing I really requested was to feature the Jamaican flag colors—black, green, and gold. The rest of the genius design was handled by my amazing cover designer Kerri Resnick and brilliant artist Colin Verdi. They interpreted Victoria perfectly, so I really didn’t have to say much.

*SA is an acronym for sexual assault.

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Investing in the Success of Black Authors

SHE LIT: Investing in the Success of Black Authors💰

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Searching for books by Black female authors this month? Take a look at authors we’ve featured

Black woman writing on a pad in front of a computer.

Lower financial investment remains a hurdle in publishing industry’s diversity pledges

We are in our third Black History Month since June 2020 when the Black Lives Matter movement ignited over the murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis by a police officer. The publishing industry responded, like many other industries, by examining the statistics of their employees as well as the contributors including the authors, illustrators, and translators.

Three years ago, publishers hired nearly 75% White employees and represented 75% White authors. Those numbers are still about the same because of money.

The percentage of White employees hasn’t changed much since publishers have revealed their diversity statistics, according to PEN America, the nonprofit dedicated to speech freedom. Its latest report finds Penguin Random House’s employees are 74% White, Macmillan’s 70.5% White, and Hachette’s 64.6% White. They lead the Big Five alongside Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins.

The nonprofit ultimately blames the historical practice of having an overwhelming White employment and how it correlates to an overwhelming amount of White authors being signed to publishing contracts. Though more Black authors are getting publishing contracts since 2020, the cracks in shattering this glass ceiling are not yet visible.

Shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement boomed in 2020, young adult author L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe campaign that set Twitter on fire. She asked White authors to share the advances. Some Black authors shared their advances. The discrepancy in thousands of dollars surprised readers. The White authors made tons more money, even hundreds of thousands of dollars more, when Black authors who seemed as well-known as them barely received a fraction of their advances.

In the report that was released last fall, Black publishing employees and executives expressed their concerns of obtaining titles by Black authors and being pigeonholed into a marketing ploy to sell “Black books.” And sometimes those Black authors are expected to just produce books about race and ethnicity when they may have ideas outside of those subjects.

“Such typecasting is not only presumptuous but also creatively limiting,” the report reads. “What if, say, a Black editor wants to work on books about cats, or cars, or science, or electoral politics? Or a Hispanic publicist wants to promote a book about classical music?”

That means a Black author’s earning potential could be diminished over the expectation of what a publisher thinks they should write compared to what they want to write. After all, the publisher has the power to reject a project on any basis it chooses.

Every book needs money to make money. The marketing and publicity budgets are calculated based on the viability of a book’s shelf life upon release. The books that have more promise receive more money, and most of the time that means books by celebrities. They are considered an automatic cash cow, especially when they have thousands and millions of social media followers expected to buy the books.

Now that the celebrity has built-in power to sell a book, the publisher invests more to make sure even more money could be made. So, the average author at an imprint may not receive what they need for proper marketing and publicity when competing with celebrity authors. And if that author is Black, then they may be shortchanged the most.

Advances, which are payments to signed authors in advance of their books being published, are tied to the marketing and publicity budgets. An advance is paid against future royalties. That means for every dollar an author receives in an advance, they must earn a dollar from book sales before they receive any additional royalties. Black authors could take longer to earn out their advances. If it takes too long, then their chances of being published again could be impacted.

“A budget is a moral document… When we talk about diversity, we need to understand what that means financially and in terms of decision-making power,” says Elizabeth Méndez Berry, vice president and executive editor at One World, in the report.

In the last year, we saw a cyberattack cripple Macmillan’s ability to sell books and a still-unresolved union strike rock HarperCollins. The authors who didn’t have the best resources in place are suffering the most with these unfortunate events in publishing. HarperCollins’ union is striking over alleged failure by the publisher to pay cost-of-living salaries and focus on diversity and inclusion. They are fighting for investment in their talents as well as in the talents of authors of color and LGBTQIA+ authors.

This Black History Month we must examine and appreciate Black literature but also think about the literature we’re missing because the publishing industry is early in the process of dismantling its historical structure to mainly uplift and invest in the literary talents of White people.

shelit.com blogger Kibby Araya.
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What we’re highlighting

Penguin Random House U.S. CEO steps down

After the failed attempt to acquire competitor Simon & Schuster for $2 billion last year, Madeline McIntosh plans to leave her position as the U.S. chief executive of Penguin Random House. She served in the position at the largest U.S. publisher since 2018. A departure date was not shared.

Her former boss and global Penguin Random House CEO, Markus Dohle, left the publisher in December. Nihar Malaviya has since assumed the position of interim global CEO.

HarperCollins announces layoffs amid union strike

The largest unionized book publisher will lay off 5% of its staff in North America by June, according to HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray. Some workers were laid off this week as well as last fall. Since November, the HarperCollins Union has been on strike, taking to social media and to the streets of New York to protest mostly low wages.

The publisher started mediation with the union this week after the announcement of the rolling layoffs.

Phenomenal Media partners with Hachette to diversify books

A year after launching its book club, Phenomenal Media recently announced its partnership with Hachette Book Group to create Phenomenal Media Books. The partnership will contribute to the development and acquisition of literary works written by underrepresented authors in the nonfiction and fiction genres.

The media company that started as a political and cultural merch brand by Meena Harris, the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris, will have its book division publish works across Hachette imprints Grand Central Publishing and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

“We were thrilled to see the positive reaction to our launch of Phenomenal Book Club — clearly people are looking for more stories from authors who, too often, do not receive the spotlight from the publishing industry,” said Meena, Phenomenal’s founder and CEO. “Phenomenal Media Books will provide new avenues for discovering those authors and positioning their works for success.”

New York town seeks to be a literary destination spot

Hobart, New York has eight indie bookstores on its Main Street and hosts several book festivals a year, according to a story by The New York Times. One of those bookstores is unstaffed and depends on the honor system for cash from customers. With a population of 400, the town in the Catskills of upstate New York has been known as Hobart Book Village since 2005. Beside book festivals, the town also holds semiannual book sale events each year, making it a place perfect for literary tourists.

February book club selections illuminate Black stories

What we’re reviewing

Brandy and Maya Angelou in Moesha.

When Maya Angelou Shared Her Wisdom on Moesha

The Vanishing Act by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half Dominates the Charts Amid #BlackStoriesMatter Movement

What we’re watching

The 1619 Project on Hulu

The 1619 Project on Hulu

The award-winning literary journalism project brought to us by Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times is a must-see docuseries on Hulu. The 1619 Project has six episodes with four streaming available now. Oprah Winfrey also serves as an executive producer.

Want your book and bookish news to be featured? Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

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When Diverse Books Don’t Cross Our Paths

SHE LIT: When Diverse Books Don’t Cross Our Paths 🧭

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#CurrentlyReading Wildblood by Lauren Blackwood 🏝️

Book covers of Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower juxtaposed in a graphic.

What it feels like for a girl in this world with invisible book bans in classrooms

There has been so much fabulous TV to binge in the new year. Are we all watching the same shows? Probably not. But one of the biggest splashes on a streaming service in the past few weeks is Ginny & Georgia on Netflix. This unique series features Ginny, a biracial teenager played by Antonia Gentry who’s troubled by the actions of her beautifully dangerous White mother, Georgia, played by Brianne Howey, who tends to murder people.

The first episode of the second season, which dropped on Netflix on Jan. 5, shows bibliophile Ginny reading Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower when Georgia walks into her bedroom. (The late Black science fiction author is having a moment on TV right now with the addition of her debut novel Kindred being turned into a FX on Hulu series.) Back to Ginny. Clutching her paperback, she’s having a nightmare, yet the real nightmare has yet to come.

She’s asked by her microaggressive White male AP English teacher to pick a book by a Black author for the class to read. In failed diversity politics in the classroom, the teacher wants Ginny to educate the class about Black literature since she’s the only Black student in the class and she’s the one who wants more inclusivity in the curriculum. After mulling the decision with her Black father Zion, played by Nathan Mitchell, in his jaw-dropping loft apartment in Boston, Ginny decides she will pick a literary masterpiece by a Black author to let her class know that not all masterpieces are written by William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, or Mark Twain.

Ginny selects Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches by the late Black lesbian feminist author about not being understood in a society that ties skin color and gender to humanity. Once introverted Ginny gives a presentation to the class about why she’s choosing Sister Outsider, the teacher then asks her to lead the class discussions on the book. Also known as do his damn job for him — for free. He has zero interest in reading or teaching the book, letting Ginny know she’s still not supported.

This pushes Ginny to the edge, and without giving too much of a spoiler, it opens up the conversation on how teens are not getting a healthy dose of diverse literature in a country still subsisting on book bans and limited curricula in schools.

More middle and high school students are creating their own book clubs to make up for the lost intellectual value. They’re dealing with books being publicly banned from their school libraries, public libraries, and in even some cases, their local bookstores, including chains such as Barnes & Noble.

What about the books that are not actually banned but will never come up on your English syllabus? What about the issue that most people stop reading after they finish schooling because homework isn’t assigned in the real world? What about teachers and professors who are conditioned to the subtractions in their literary knowledge that they don’t evolve to diversify their reading lists?

With conversations swirling around book bans, there needs to be more attention to the invisible book bans like how a book by Audre Lorde is less likely to be read in high school. Personally, I never heard of Audre Lorde until I attended a historically Black college, and I didn’t read Sister Outsider until a few years ago. A lot of us are still making up for the years and years of almost exclusively reading books by White male authors that were assigned to us in school.

Books keep multiplying every year. Our to-be-read lists are drowning with our selections. But there are a thousand books I wish I read in high school instead of so much Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Twain. The catch-up game is real. Most kids who love reading are balancing the school-assigned books with the pleasure books that they see themselves in.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most kids are struggling to recover their social skills again. So reading for fun may not be a top pastime for them. There will be people like Ginny’s teacher who refuse to value literature by authors who are not straight White men and will try to humiliate others for valuing literature from different perspectives.

shelit.com blogger Kibby Araya.
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What we’re highlighting

Meg Medina succeeds Jason Reynolds as youth ambassador

Middle grade novelist Meg Medina has been named the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a selection made by the Library of Congress. She is the eighth ambassador and the first Hispanic person to assume the position. Starting this week, she replaces acclaimed young adult and middle grade author Jason Reynolds who held the position since 2020.

“It’s an enormous honor to advocate for the reading and writing lives of our nation’s children and families,” said the author, who identifies as Cuban American, in a statement. “I realize the responsibility is critical, but with the fine examples of previous ambassadors to guide me, I am eager to get started on my vision for this important work.”

Her platform “Cuéntame!: Let’s talk books” will focus on uniting children and families in literary conversations. The name of the campaign is inspired by the phrase Spanish-speaking friends and families use to catch up with one another. Meg’s books include the middle grade novel Merci Suárez Changes Gears. She plans to serve a two-year term.

North Dakota introduces bill to ban ‘sexually explicit’ books

North Dakota is the latest state to examine a bill that promises to eliminate books with alleged “sexually explicit” content from public libraries. House Bill No. 1205 also states a person could be guilty of a class B misdemeanor if they willfully display to a minor “any photograph, book, paperback book, pamphlet, or magazine” that shows “nude or partially denuded human figures posed or presented in a manner to exploit sex, lust, or perversion for commercial gain.”

A class B misdemeanor in North Dakota carries a maximum penalty of 30 days in prison and/or a fine of $1,500. That means a librarian could be charged for shelving a book that falls into this category. People who believe a public library has a book that has said nudity and/or sexual depictions can submit a request to have the book removed from the library. The library then has to remove the book within 30 days.

The bill has so far had a committee meeting. Many librarians and library board members throughout the state have already filed letters in opposition to the new bill, including the ACLU.

Netflix releases ‘Perfect Find’ film photos, expected premiere

Tia Williams’ 2016 novel The Perfect Find is being turned into a film with streaming giant Netflix that released some information this week. Though we still don’t have a set date for the premiere, Netflix announced the film is a part of its summer 2023 slate of new content in a press release (and not in its promo video). The film stars Gabrielle Union as a fashion editor in Manhattan who falls for a guy half her age who happens to be the son of her work frenemy, who will be played by Suits alum Gina Torres.

What we’re reviewing

Actress Gabrielle Union.

Gabrielle Union Shines Light on Books by Black Women With Screen Projects

A girl holds a stack of books with a backdrop of library bookshelves.

One World Authors Mark Banned Books Week With Conversation on Self-Education

What we’re watching

Zión Moreno in Gossip Girl on HBO Max.

Gossip Girl on HBO Max

The reboot series based on Cecily von Ziegesar’s best-selling novels about girls and guys navigating the elite prep school social scene in New York City has been canceled by HBO’s streamer this week. At the height of the books’ popularity in the mid-aughts, the original series that ran from 2007 to 2012 on the CW became a phenomenon, launching the careers of Blake Lively and Leighton Meester. This newer, more diverse version meant for a Gen Z audience failed to make the same impact. Both seasons are streaming on HBO Max.

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New Year, Old Books

SHE LIT: New Year, Old Books 🥳

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Out of the 16 books below, I’ve only read seven 📚😬

Books with red covers by female authors on the shelit.com bookshelf.

Staying relevant as a book blogger by still reading new books, rediscovering old books

Happy 2023! Champagne clinks and literary links ushered in the new year. Innovating shelit.com for another year means thinking more about the blog’s future and purpose.

Like many readers, my library has expanded beyond its limits, multiplying on several shelves and already outgrowing those spaces. I love buying books from thrift stores, used bookstores, new bookstores, book festivals, library fairs, yard sales, garage sales, estate sales. Anywhere a book can be bought, I bought it.

The urge became more important when I noticed books by Black women on sale, sometimes a rare sight, a revelation I learned from The Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles. Books by Black women are usually not uplifted online or in the bricks-and-mortar as much as they could be. Neither are books by women of Indigenous, Latine, and Asian descent.

Young adult author Kalynn Bayron shared her disdain for walking into a bookstore that promoted books by BookTokers and noticing only one out of the 10 books was by a non-Black author of color. Diversity is still a problem in the publishing industry in many aspects, especially when it comes to fewer marketing dollars being given to non-celebrity authors of color.

While I’ve been collecting gems by female authors, I also haven’t been reading as many books as I want. As a book blogger promoting new books for search engine optimization and overall audience boost, I ignored most of my books in favor of buying new books, getting new books from publishers, and checking new books out from the library.

Books were piling up like I hadn’t learned anything from Christine Platt’s The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less where she offers the viewpoint of having too much stuff to meet a Eurocentric society’s desire for excess. Or when Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace advised on how to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not working and reflect on how to make things work for you. So, I have too many books that will take me years to read. And I need to refocus my love for books on forgotten treasures while still checking on the over-marketed new books, especially if they’re written by a woman of color. #PublishingPaidMe is still relevant today as it was in 2020.

I have read books in the last year that I want to share more with readers who may not have known about the book or maybe never had the chance to read it. One example is Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, which I bought from Myopic Books in Chicago. Another is bell hooks’ Bone Black. Both had been on my bookshelf for a while, so it felt gratifying to finally read these great works by great authors and discuss those stories.

More bookish outlets are also trying to elevate older works like Belletrist’s 2021 book club selection with Tananarive Due’s The Between, which was originally published in 1995. That book is also on my bookshelf. Thanks to the Ladera Heights Goodwill Store in Los Angeles for that find.

Books from previous years and even decades still need our support and attention. The marketing problem is a historic problem, where books by women, particularly women of color, got lost in the mix among Harry Potter-type fantasies, mysteries by men, and celebrity memoirs, just to name a few. I look forward to sharing my library and love for curation this year by discovering works that deserve to be rediscovered.

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What we’re highlighting

2023 forecasted to be a rough year for books

The spike in book bans spreading from school libraries to big-box retailers over the debate of what’s appropriate in children’s literature is considered to be a major factor in the book sales slump, according to end-of-year media reports. Mostly works by non-White authors and LGBTQ+ authors are at the center of these book bans.

How the publishing industry markets books was one of the insider secrets the public received during last year’s blockbuster trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and Penguin Random House over the publisher’s proposed merger with Simon & Schuster. A federal judge blocked the merger in October. PRH’s global CEO stepped down. Authors and readers alike worried about the Big Five becoming the Big Four. Most of the books we tell you about are from Penguin Random House, as you will notice linked below in other news.

Publishing industry employees going on strike echoed all last year. The only major unionized publisher, HarperCollins, went on strike in November. Workers are still on strike, according to updates to the union’s Twitter feed. They claim that “untrained temps” will be hired to replace them to edit stories, design covers, and promote books. This week, the union asked the publisher’s CEO to return to the negotiation table to end the strike. The employees are demanding mostly fair wages to live in the publishing megalopolis of New York City.

Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry sold less than one quarter of the first week print sales of her 2018 memoir Becoming, the NPD Group found, as the Forever First Lady’s book had a massive book tour with rock concert audiences (and prices) and still became a No. 1 best-seller. The NPD Group also noted Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home by the global superstar organizer ranked as low as No. 4,742 on Amazon.com upon its release, as reported by The New York Times. The reason for the lower book sales: The industry is trying to rebound from the pandemic highs. And a recession is looming.

Ketanji Brown Jackson announces upcoming memoir

The first Black female Supreme Court justice will write about her journey to the highest court. Titled Lovely One for the translation of her West African name, Justice Jackson plans to discuss her upbringing in Miami and her advancement in Big Law as a mother, a wife, and a Black woman. Publisher Random House has not shared a release date.

“Mine has been an unlikely journey,” she said in a statement from Random House. “But the path was paved by courageous women and men in whose footsteps I placed my own, road warriors like my own parents, and also luminaries in the law, whose brilliance and fortitude lit my way.”

Celebrity-helmed book clubs select January picks

What we’re reviewing

From Scratch Episode Recaps

Luckiest Girl Alive Film Makes Character’s Traumas Leap Off the Page

What we’re watching

Kindred on FX Hulu

Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel Kindred has been adapted to the screen with an eight-episode series streaming now on Hulu via FX. The story follows a Black woman living in modern-day Los Angeles who keeps getting transported to antebellum Maryland. She ends up saving her White ancestor as a child and embarks on a journey of fighting for her freedom physically on the plantation and mentally in order to return to her present life. Our book review can be found here.

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‘From Scratch’ TV Review: Aftertastes

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Read the book, book review, and/or watch the limited series on Netflix.

A wife must come to terms with losing her husband and uniting her family abroad as they grieve in the Netflix series From Scratch. Based on the best-selling memoir by actress Tembi Locke, the series’ last episode summarizes the grief that is expressed throughout the book.

In the last episode, Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, brought her husband Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, home to palliative care as his rare soft-tissue cancer worsened with no cure in sight. After a few days of bittersweet heartache, Lino dies. When Amy meets with palliative care counselor in “Between the Fire and the Pan” episode, she’s told to bring her daughter, Idalia, played by Isla Colbert, to Lino after he passes. She does that in the beginning of this episode to let her daughter grieve her father.

The grieving process is palpable. Amy later collapses as her mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, and her sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, bathe her in the bathtub as she uncontrollably cries. We don’t hear the grief as instrumental music drowns them out. Amy then stays in bed while her family takes over her house. Zora tells Amy that she’s afraid of her slipping away. Amy breaks down that she can’t fly to Sicily to bring Lino’s ashes home. She doesn’t have the energy; she already gave her all.

FINDING HOME IN SICILY

Amy finds herself driving on the rollercoaster roads of Sicily with Idalia in the backseat, along with Lino’s ashes. They follow the directions to Lino’s family’s home, where they are greeted by the entire town led by Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo. Amy rises out of the car and presents Lino’s ashes to his mother. Filomena gets teary as she carries the urn high in a solemn parade through the narrow alleys to her house.

The priest comes to the house for the blessing while Filomena breaks down. Idalia gets agitated about the overwhelming emotion in the room. Amy carries her to their guest room where she explains they are leaving Lino in Sicily. Idalia thought her father would come back with them to Los Angeles. After the blessing, Filomena tells Idalia she can see her father anytime in her imagination. All in black, the family later goes on another trek to bury Lino as the townspeople bow in respect.

The next day, Filomena makes Amy breakfast, consoling her about the everlasting heartbreak of losing a husband. Filomena’s husband and Lino’s father Giacomo, played by Paride Benassai, dies in the episode “Heirlooms,” a year after visiting the family in LA in the “Bread and Brine” episode. Neither of Lino’s parents attend the wedding for Amy and Lino that takes place in Italy, a sore spot in the “A Villa. A Broom. A Cake.” episode that continues to emerge throughout the series. This is not the first time they have spoken, but it’s the first time Amy has been in the family household and is being treated with care by her semi-estranged mother-in-law.

Amy goes to a wine bar for a moment of peace away from her family. She’s the only woman there. The older Sicilian men watch her in suspicion. Not only is she American, but she is Black, and they have probably never seen someone who looks like her up close. The town’s mayor shares his condolences with Amy. She walks out of the bar and notices the women hanging outside on their patios watch her walk back to Filomena’s house. In Italian, they comment on her darker complexion. Amy thinks it’s comical that they don’t realize she understands Italian as she heads home. For another break, she runs up the hills around the town and sneaks a peek of the Mediterranean Sea as the backdrop to rolling green hills. That’s her moment of peace.

TOWN GOSSIP

“Grief in Sicily is not an individual experience but a communal one where people are called upon to witness and support one another,” Tembi writes in the book where she recounts her life with her late husband Saro, who died from cancer. “The way certain African cultures use drumming as an active means of dealing with their grief—the rhythm is played continuously for days, day and night, over and over, as a constant reminder to the community of its loss—in Sicily the story of the deceased is told over and over.”

In the show, the mourning tour continues as Filomena brings Amy and Idalia to other townspeople’s homes to sit and relive memories of Lino. At one home, Idalia gets sick eating too much candy. The nosy women notice Idalia gripping her tummy once they’re outside and convince Filomena to take this opportunity to see the doctor’s house. Nobody has really seen the so-called palace-like interior. The women want to know what’s inside the massive house. Amy can’t believe she’s being wrapped up in town gossip.

Filomena takes Idalia’s hand as they head to the doctor’s mysterious home. He invites them inside to sit with them in the their mourning. They notice a photo of the doctor with Lino framed on a side table. The two are standing outside the restaurant in Florence where Amy and Lino fell in love in the debut episode “First Tastes.” The doctor explains he had visited Florence and met with Lino years ago. He now prays often for Lino. The unexpected visit becomes the most impactful. Once they leave, the women swarm around the family to hear what they saw. Idalia tells them that she saw several chandeliers inside. This satisfies the town gossipers.

That night, Amy dreams of Lino. She finds him in the kitchen in Sicily cooking her a meal. They embrace. Then she wakes up. She can see him whenever she wants. In the morning, she learns Filomena wants her to meet with the family lawyer. Filomena doesn’t give Amy details until Amy finds herself beside her sister-in-law being asked by the lawyer to sign papers. It’s a deed to the land. Now that Lino as the oldest son is gone, Amy inherits the farmland. She refuses to sign the paperwork.

While resting back at the house, Amy is summoned. A dispute over a car accident with the town’s mayor has broken out with a driver who speaks English. The driver tells Amy that the mayor hit his car. Amy explains to the driver that the man in the car is the mayor, and with the townspeople crowding the area, the mayor will win the argument. The driver takes the loss and speeds away. The townspeople cheer for Amy. She’s one of their own.

SANT’ANNA

Amy goes to church with Filomena while it’s empty. Filomena is praying to Saint Anne or Sant’Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, the grandmother of Jesus Christ. She says she prayed to this saint when Amy and Lino married, when Lino died. She wants Amy to make Sicily her home. That’s why she sent her to the lawyer’s office to inherit the land. Later, Amy brings Idalia to the spot she had found while running where the hills and the sea create a picturesque vision of peace. Amy tells Idalia that this is where Lino still feels alive because it’s their home.

Sant’Anna’s Day falls on Amy’s birthday. Sant’Anna is the patron saint of travelers and widows. It’s the opportune time to celebrate Lino.

“These women pray to her in times of difficulty and times of celebration,” Tembi writes in the book. “I had also learned that she was the patron saint of widows and travelers. I was born on her day, July 26. I was married on her day. For the people of Aliminusa, that meant she was my personal saint. ‘You drew a good card,’ Nonna told me.” Her family comes to Sicily to join in the Sant’Anna Day procession that starts with a prayer then ends with the band playing in celebration. She describes the moment as the “magic hour,” a phrase in cinematography describing “the moment when the diffused rays of the sun make everything more beautiful.”

Magic hour happens onscreen for Amy’s family, who flies from LA and Texas, to join Amy, Idalia, and Lino’s family as they celebrate life. The joyous and heart-wrenching event ends the series.

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‘From Scratch’ TV Review: Between the Fire and the Pan

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Read the book, book review, and/or watch the limited series on Netflix.

Netflix’s limited series From Scratch follows a couple affected by cancer, but after years of remission, they’re seeing cancer rear its ugly head again right when they feel like they’re back on track.

Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, and Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, have just found out that Lino’s rare soft-tissue cancer has made a return after seven years in remission. Seven years ago, they weren’t parents to their adopted daughter, Idalia, played by Isla Colbert. They try to strategize how to talk to their young daughter about Lino’s cancer spreading to this lungs.

The family has a picnic at the park, where Idalia wants to share her ice cream cone with Lino. But Amy has to tell her that her father can’t have ice cream because he’s sick. Immediately, Idalia puts her ice cream cone down, as if she knows the history of the cancer and the possibility of its return.

Later, Amy cuts Lino’s hair in their home’s garden. It has become a sanctuary for them to grow the seeds of foods from Sicily that are necessary for Lino’s authentic Sicilian cooking. When Lino was first diagnosed with cancer in the “Bitter Almonds” episode, he cut his hair alone in the bathroom amid his chemotherapy treatments. But now Amy makes sure she’s present for Lino as he sacrifices a part of himself for his illness.

Amy’s mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, and Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, takes turns sitting with Lino during his chemo treatments. On Zora’s shift, Lino gets a spiked fever. He’s rushed to the hospital as Zora calls Amy. The family is back in the hospital monitoring Lino. Amy learns that Lino was taking anti-anxiety meds that may have contributed to his fever.

Lino’s condition worsens. Nurses and doctors keep ignoring Amy’s pleas to find out what’s wrong with Lino. They tell Amy that they can only talk to family. Since Amy is Black and so are the family members in LA, the racism patients and their families experience in the hospital is on full display. Amy notifies the carousel of doctors that she is Lino’s wife and deserves straight answers, but she’s not getting any straight answers.

When the rest of Amy’s family arrives from Texas, Amy receives a call from Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo. Filomena tells Amy that she had a dream of the Virgin Mary. The Lord is calling Lino home. Amy absorbs the heartbreaking premonition and leans into finding out why her husband is deteriorating.

Meanwhile, Lino is so sick that he’s considered infectious, so children are not allowed in the wing of the hospital where he’s receiving care. This adds more distress to Amy because Idalia cannot see her father. The family devises a way to sneak Idalia inside to spend time with her father. Idalia sits beside Lino as they read a book together. The touching moment inspires Amy to later have dinner alone with Lino while he’s propped up in his hospital bed. Lino asks Amy to go back to her life during his recovery. But they still don’t have answers on what the recovery will entail.

Lino is not getting better. Amy calls Lino’s oncologist about the hepatologist also treating Lino. The oncologist says Lino needs a liver transplant. Amy chases the hepatologist down in the parking garage, where the doctor tries to stay mum after hours but then reveals Lino’s liver is failing. After finally receiving a confirmation, Amy yells at the hepatologist for not being straight with her. None of the many specialists treating Lino seem to be communicating as Lino undergoes countless tests. As Lino’s condition worsens even under this magnitude of surveillance, Amy notices an advertisement for palliative care.

Amy and the palliative care specialist talk about giving Lino care as his body dies. He needs comfort at this point. Continuing medical care is pointless and expensive. Amy notifies Filomena about the decision. Lino leaves the hospital via ambulance as their home is prepared for his last days.

Within days, Lino requests a party to see family and friends at their home’s garden. Amy detects his burst of energy, but their family friend Preston, played by Rodney Gardiner, gives Amy the voice of reason that sometimes a burst of energy reinvigorates someone who is dying. The loved ones surround Lino in the garden.

CARING FAMILY

The frustration of seeing a loved one suffer in their condition mirrors the book, where memoirist Tembi Locke describes her journey of falling in love with her husband to caring for him as he dies from a rare cancer. A parade of specialists go in and out of her late husband Saro’s hospital room.

“Suddenly we had descended into a medical landscape of dueling specialists, expert professionals each of whom saw one piece of the puzzle that was Saro’s body,” Tembi writes. “I was the only one looking at the whole of his life, his body, his heartfelt desires. I tried to humanize the patient behind the chart.”

The discrimination is another aspect. Tembi’s omnipresence in the hospital room is not enough for medical staff to understand she’s the main point of contact for her husband’s care.

“As the heads of hepatology, endocrinology, immunology, gastroenterology, and orthopedic surgery made their rounds, I succumbed to writing my name on the hospital room whiteboard: ‘CARING FAMILY: Tembi, wife. Black woman sitting in the corner.’ It was my response after two nurses had asked me if I was ‘the help.'”

Experiencing racism as a caretaker puts added stress on the situation. With some of the book’s elements changed for the screen, this is a situation that needed to be shown that even in a matter of illness, a person’s skin color can impact the information they receive to deal with the illness. It’s one of the several moments throughout the TV series and the book that shows an interracial couple receiving backlash for their union. Even when it’s a matter of life and death, medical care may be subpar. We see in the next episode that when the patient and their family take matters into their own hands, they can live the rest of their lives on their terms.

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‘From Scratch’ TV Review: Heirlooms

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Read the book, book review, and/or watch the limited series on Netflix.

The sixth episode of Netflix’s limited series From Scratch shows a couple affected by cancer deciding to expand their family after a loss.

The critically acclaimed memoir of the same name by actress Tembi Locke follows her love path with her late husband Saro and how she ventures to his homeland of Sicily with their daughter after his death. The show features a fictional adaptation of her story.

It’s fall 2006, 18 months after Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, is declared cancer-free. He learns his father has died suddenly from a heart attack in the fields he farmed in Sicily. Consoled by his wife Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, Lino thinks it’s time for them to be parents. His cancer has been at bay with a clinical trial ending.

Like many couples, they begin looking at in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination for the chance of having a biological child. Amy feels overwhelmed about the prospects of putting her body through a lot of changes to have a baby. She doesn’t have a problem with adopting a baby, and Lino realizes he feels the same way.

Six months later, Amy and Lino are in the wedding party for Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler. As soon as the ceremony ends, Amy and Lino receive the call for their daughter. They rush to the hospital to meet with the birth mother, a UCLA student who says she and the baby’s father can finish school without worry now that their daughter will be placed with the right couple.

She explains the couple’s adversity with their interracial and intercultural union and battle with cancer are the reasons why she thought they’d be good parents. The birth mother appears to be Asian while the birth father appears to be Black, making the baby biracial. Lino leaves the room to give Amy and the birth mother more privacy. Amy learns the baby reminds the birth mother of her grandmother, Rose. She adds Rose as a middle name for Idalia, which she says means “behold the sun” in Italian.

In an interview before the series premiered, Tembi said her daughter Zoela chose the name Idalia for the character based on her.

Baby Idalia goes home where Amy’s mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, and her stepmother Maxine, played by Judith Scott, have a fight. A natural health enthusiast, Lynn suggests Amy buy breast milk online to feed Idalia. But Maxine thinks buying bodily fluids from random women on the internet is a bad idea. Maxine, who was unable to birth her own children, feels that her insight is ignored simply because she never gave birth.

“Heirlooms” is the chapter in the memoir marking one year after Saro’s death. Tembi is fielding phone calls from her family members who are flying to Los Angeles from Texas to be with her and eight-year-old Zoela on the anniversary. The chapter name is not for heirloom tomatoes but for fava beans grown from Sicilian seeds in their LA garden. Tembi tells her mother-in-law she plans to serve fava beans to her family and friends in commemoration of her late husband.

“She knew about the heirloom beans, passed down through generations in Sicily, that we had been growing every year,” she writes. “It made her happy to imagine them growing in foreign soil, feeding us thousands of miles away. She gave me tips on how to keep the beans creamy once pureed… I hung up the phone and looked at the pile of fava beans. Some people have heirloom jewelry. I had fava beans.”

Zoela’s adoption story similar to Idalia’s is featured in the chapter “Something Great.”

“My family had welcomed my cousin into our kin by way of international adoption just one year before Saro and I had walked down the aisle,” Tembi writes. “I was watching her grow up from a distance, seeing her at holidays and family gatherings. I saw the joy in her parents’ eyes. I saw the love. I saw the way adoption was deeply intentional and expanding. I saw another way a family could be formed, and I was hooked.”

Like in the show with Amy and Lino, Tembi and Saro decide to be honest about the cancer in the medical history section of their adoption application. After three months, they are placed with their daughter. The call about her birth comes when Tembi is at a Pilates class in LA’s Silver Lake. The couple flies to San Francisco to pick up their daughter.

“We told the birth mom what we planned to name the baby: Zoela. Saro and I loved the name, an ancient Italian moniker meaning ‘piece of the earth,'” Tembi writes. “We thought it symbolic for the child who had brought strangers together. Her name reflected the diversity of her biology and cultures. She was African American, Filipina, Italian, and even, Saro added, Sicilian.”

Back to the show’s episode, Lino undergoes a scan. Him dropping his wedding ring into a plastic tray while dressed in a hospital gown before heading into the scan becomes a regular shot throughout the series. He’s always being checked for cancer. Upon his new fatherhood, he remains cancer-free, for now.

QUALITY TIME

Fast forward to fall 2011. Idalia is a four-year-old sous chef in Lino’s kitchen when she flips a frittata. Idalia and Lino chat about her school’s social scene with the kids and their mothers. Lino is a stay-at-home dad while Amy carries on with her art career to support the family. With Lino still using a cane because of the cancer starting in his knee, he’s still unable to stand for long hours in a kitchen as a chef.

Seeing the close bond between Lino and Idalia, Amy starts to feel jealous that she doesn’t get enough time with Idalia since she’s the sole breadwinner. She confides in Zora that she hates how cancer has disrupted their lives. Lino not being able to work and getting checked for cancer have put a strain on their relationship, Amy shares. She’s upset about her jealousy since the time Lino has with Idalia is precious.

At home, Amy is struggling to keep up with yet another conversation about Idalia’s friends and their mothers and who’s bringing what to a potluck. She finally breaks down to Lino with letting him know she’s jealous of the bonding time he has with their daughter. Lino argues he’s jealous, too. He can’t work as a chef; he can’t do the job he loves.

The episode jumps to spring 2014 where Amy has cut her hours at work to spend more time with Idalia. Lino starts a cooking class, where he can do what he loves in a controlled amount of time.

One day, they eat corndogs together at home. Lino fell for corndogs in the second episode of the series when he goes to an American supermarket for the first time. But this time, Lino chokes on the corndog. Though he tells Amy the corndog bite went down the wrong hole, Lino looks concerned while looking at his family, who are chatting and eating away unaware of the concern.

Lino gets another scan. While waiting for his results, he plans a date night with Amy. They dance carefully. Amy notices a bad rash on Lino’s wrist. Later in their bathroom, Amy finds a hospital bracelet and notices Lino had a scan without telling her. All signs are pointing to the cancer making a return; a reality they tried to avoid, and have avoided, for several years. Now as parents, the stakes are higher. Lino’s concern has transferred to Amy.

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‘From Scratch’ TV Review: Bread and Brine

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Read the book, book review, and/or watch the limited series on Netflix.

Christmas 2004 opens up the fifth episode of From Scratch when the parents of Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, arrive in Los Angeles to care for their son who’s battling a rare soft-tissue cancer.

Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, is standing at the end of the escalator with her mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, as they wait for Lino’s father Giacomo, played by Paride Benassai, and Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo, to come down to their level in the airport. Amy has to run up the escalator to help them since they probably never used one before. Once they all arrive at the house, Lino becomes the focus.

Filomena rushes to her bedridden son while Giacomo stops before the front door and remains in the garden. As a lifelong farmer, he sees myriad mistakes in the boxes where plants like garlic and parsley are growing. He stays outside to tend to the garden.

Inside, Filomena opens up her heavy suitcase to reveal glass jars of pastas, spices, herbs, and tomatoes. She cooks a hearty meal for Lino, but Amy has to tell her that Lino can’t eat that type of meal on his medications. Lino gets jealous others get to eat his mother’s cooking, so he stuffs his face. And, of course, he gets nauseous before his scheduled stay in the hospital.

The transportation of the food happens in the memoir by Tembi Locke as she tells the story of falling in love with her late husband Saro and moving through the stages of grief with her daughter in Saro’s homeland of Sicily.

“Bread and Brine” is the name of a chapter. With the book mostly focusing on Tembi’s time in Sicily after her husband dies, the chapter shows the relationship between Tembi and her mother-in-law Croce, who cooks as she grieves.

“She had never let me cook in her house. Never. Not even her chef son was allowed to,” Tembi writes. “No matter how many nights I slept under her roof, no matter how many times she washed my bras and ironed my underwear, I was her guest. Even if I was also family. She preferred to work alone, at her own pace; she didn’t want company while she cooked. In the past, I had just passed through, made small talk, but had never lingered from start to finish. She, like many women in town, saw their time at the stove as their domain. I was forbidden to even set the table.”

coffee break

As Lino recovers from surgery, Giacomo finally comes to greet his son in the hospital bed. They have a small heart-to-heart when Lino says he would like a cup of coffee. This gives Giacomo a spring in his step as he walks around the hospital in search of coffee without knowing English. He finds a doctor who seems to know a bit of Italian who helps him use the coffee machine. He tells a story about seeing Lino in the hospital when he was a kid who had broken a bone, but now it’s different.

When he returns to the hospital room, he sees Amy’s father Hershel, played by Keith David, bonding with Lino. Standing by the door, he notices the connection between the two, blossoming over his absence from his son’s life at a time when he expanded his family.

Lino soon comes home, where his family and friends sit down to watch football, also known as soccer, on the Italian channels. Giacomo asks one of Lino’s friends about his son. As they talk about kids, Lino becomes increasingly irritated because the chemotherapy has threatened his reproductivity. He gets up and leaves with his crutch.

IT COULD GET WORSE

For a moment of escape, Amy runs to her and Lino’s mutual friend Preston, played by Rodney Gardiner, to drink scotch and talk. He welcomes the opportunity, especially when he’s just watching the Black Christmas classic Holiday Heart starring Ving Rhames as a drag queen helping a girl and her drug-addicted mother. Amy is upbeat about Lino’s surgery to remove the cancer. But Preston has other thoughts. He offers the possibility that Lino may never quite fully recover; the cancer can return.

The doctor tells Amy and Lino that the surgery was successful, but recurrence is possible. Lino describes cancer as “like a weed” to his parents, who learn they have to tame their excitement over the surgery.

Since the surgery was technically a success, Lino now qualifies for a clinical trial. He announces the news at dinner with the entire family. Then Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, announces her engagement to her longtime boyfriend Ken, played by Terrell Carter. The family congratulates the happy couple. Even Giacomo stands up ready to give a toast. Lino is in disbelief. His own father who didn’t go to his wedding is happy an unrelated couple is getting married. The bright mood plummets.

Going back to the book, Tembi brings Saro and his parents to her native Texas to meet her family. Saro’s parents enjoy a Houston Texans football game and struggle to figure out the art of eating Texas Barbecue. Tembi catches her mother-in-law taking in the scene, looking at her son constantly until she turns to Tembi’s sister Attica Locke, who serves as the head of the Netflix series, to tell her her surprise about Saro being welcomed in America.

“And as I sat there with everyone eating—not just consuming food but sharing our dreams, our aspirations, our histories—I could see how the stakes, the specter of illness, had changed all our lives,” Tembi writes. “What was important had changed. We were far from the wedding in Florence, reading telegrams from the half of our family who had refused to come because of race and fear. That trip to Houston was the first time we didn’t have to wonder what it would have been like to have both parts of who we were together in the same room.”

The next morning on the show, Lino and Giacomo clear the air with a hug as Lino’s parents head out for their flight to Sicily. The cancer is gone, and the family is at peace until the next monumental changes come along.