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Netflix Book Club to Discuss Nella Larsen Classic ‘Passing’ in Time for Film Release

Coining itself the home of the “world’s most talked-about book adaptations,” streaming giant Netflix is debuting a book club series hosted by a star of one of its first book-to-TV hits. 

Orange Is the New Black star Uzo Aduba will host the Netflix Book Club‘s social series “But Have You Read the Book?” premiering Nov. 16 on streamer’s YouTube and Facebook channels. November’s book selection is Passing by Nella Larsen, which will also have a Nov. 10 book-to-film release on Netflix starring Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson.

The first book club episode will have Uzo interview the film’s stars and director Rebecca Hall.

Netflix

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked friends, ‘But have you read the book?’ So I’m excited to host Netflix Book Club and bring together loyal book fans, TV and movie obsessives and the creators behind their favorite stories,” Uzo said in a statement. “I can’t wait to dive deep into the creative process and what it takes to bring a book to life.”

Passing follows two Black women who are fair-skinned enough to pass as White. Clare Kendry sees her childhood friend Irene Redfield in a hotel, and they chat about what life has been like since their upbringing in Chicago. Irene quickly learns that Clare has been passing full-time as a White woman married to a White man who has no idea his wife is Black. With her complexion, Irene can pass, too, but she chooses to have her Black family and engage with the Black community she’s always known. Clare tries to convince Irene she is living the ideal life until Irene meets Clare’s bigoted husband and realizes the danger Clare has put herself in. Both women struggle to have each other in their lives in case anyone finds out their shared secret.

Nella Larsen, who was born in 1891 to a Black father from the Danish West Indies and a White mother from Denmark, was considered one of the most well-known female authors during the Harlem Renaissance. Passing, her second novel released in 1929 after her debut Quicksand, soon became a standout at the time in the elite arts community, rivaling the popularity of Zora Neale Hurston‘s 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. Nella received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a third novel in 1930, according to her current publisher Penguin Random House, but she couldn’t find a publisher. She died in 1964.

Passing also has enjoyed modern-day success thanks to the film and the best-selling gold of Brit Bennett’s 2019 literary fiction masterpiece The Vanishing Half about fair-skinned Black twin sisters who lead separate lives as one decides to live her life as a White woman. Brit, who recently had a book-signing cameo on HBO‘s Insecure, wrote the introduction to the newest copies of Passing. The Vanishing Half is being developed into a miniseries for HBO.

“From Bridgerton, To All the Boys and Sweet Magnolias to Queen’s Gambit, Unorthodox, Virgin River and of course Orange Is the New Black, Netflix loves bringing books to life on screen and creating conversation with passionate readers and fans,” said Netflix chief marketing officer Bozoma Saint John in a statement about the book club series. The marketing maven herself has a forthcoming book with Viking Books called The Urgent Life that will be focused on her life during and after her late husband’s cancer diagnosis.

Starbucks is partnering with Netflix to bring the book club to social media.

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From the Editor: Adding More Works to Our Libraries by Native American Women

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

There are no books by Native Americans in my library.

The stark realization hit me when I peered at the spine of every book in my possession, and nothing centered on Native American life.

November is National Native American Heritage Month. Last month, I wrote a post on the diversity problem in my library when it came to Latina authors. As a Black woman identifying as African and African American, I’m still playing catch up with works by Black authors and finding that it may be more difficult to see books by a variety of Black women in a bookstore or library. For the average person not being exposed to the diversity of female voices is what this website explores.

To increase my knowledge, I read three books in a row by Latina authors in preparation to ensure more voices are added to my to-be-read aka the #tbr list on an ongoing basis. I also have to make that concerted effort to read more books by Native American women and keep searching for their stories to enhance my overall reading experience.

This month and beyond, I plan to read the following award-winning best-sellers:

An American Sunrise and Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is the 23rd poet laureate of the United States, now serving her second term as the nation’s top poet. Among her nine books of poetry, An American Sunrise is one of her most critically acclaimed works. She is also a memoirist with Poet Warrior being her newest autobiography. She is member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Both books are published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a SUNY distinguished teaching professor of environmental biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her second book, Braiding Sweetgrass, made the best-seller lists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. She is member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Her book is published by Milkweed Editions.

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good

Michelle Good is a poet and novelist with her 2020 debut Five Little Indians that won several awards, including Amazon Canada First Novel Award. She also works as a lawyer advocating for residential school survivors. She is a descendent of the Battle River Cree and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation.

Her book is published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko became one of the first Native American authors to gain recognition in the literary world with her 1977 novel Ceremony. She followed up that success with a series of novels and a memoir. Growing up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, her ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European blood.

Her book is a part of the Penguin Orange Collection published by Penguin Classics of Penguin Random House.

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Well-Read Black Girl Festival Recognizes Works Centering on Black Girlhood

Well-Read Black Girl marked five years with its annual book festival on Saturday centering on the theme of Black girlhood.

On Girlhood is the name of founder Glory Edim‘s second anthology released this week from the W. W. Norton & Company imprint Liveright featuring works from the literary organization’s library by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove.

The daylong event started with a prerecorded surprise message from former First Lady Michelle Obama, who opened up about the support she received from the Black female audience for her record-shattering memoir Becoming.

Keynote speaker Gabrielle Union discussed in-depth the themes underlying her latest autobiographical story collection You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories with Glory in a prerecorded conversation.

The collection is a follow-up to Gabrielle’s 2017 best-seller We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True. She said she learned from the “overwhelming” response from readers that there is a “desperate need for community and to be seen and understood and to be embraced by one another.”

“I left out a lot in the first book,” she said. “And as brave as folks thought I was and as revealing as folks thought I was, I knew that there was a lot I hadn’t healed enough from to include in that first book.”

Brene Brown’s podcast and TED talks on shame and vulnerability along with therapy helped her cope with the stories she wanted to share in her new book, she said.

“It logically just clicked; it made perfect sense. Then to see a shaman who said very similar things, and he was like, ‘Yo, Gab, what if what if your vulnerability is actually your superpower?” she said, adding, “You associate vulnerability with being weak and you feel that it is counterintuitive to just expose your full self to challenges, struggles, joys, all of it, random feelings. You feel like that’s giving the opposition the ammunition to take you out but really it’s sharpening your sword to tackle the world.”

Feeling more comfortable with the situations that made her who she is, Gabrielle said she has adopted a “zero fucks given” philosophy with age when it comes to sharing her stories and battling the haters. She turned 49 on Friday.

“When the chatter gets little louder and the folks around me are like, ‘Did you hear what so-and-so said?’ No one with a hot take on my family or me has ever been anyone I’ve admired or whose life I wanted to emulate,” she said.

She discusses in length the backstories behind some of her new book’s chapters. The she lit book review can be found here.

On Girlhood

For the On Girlhood panel, WRBG scholar-in-residence Bianca Williams moderated the conversation with Glory and Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature published by W. W. Norton.

“Nikki Rosa” a poem by Nikki Giovanni in the The Black Woman: An Anthology and Sula by Toni Morrison were the titles Farah said became inspiring Black girlhood works. Toni and Zora Neale Hurston defined the Black girlhood subgenre, she added.

“They both handled girlhood so well. They both gave us unforgettable Black girls,” she said. “Toni gave us Pecola and she also gives us Claudia and Frieda [The Bluest Eye] and Denver [Beloved], all of these Black girls. Janie [Their Eyes Were Watching God] is a girl, so we see ourselves as girls for the first time, fully dimensional in the work of Black women writers.”

Zeba Blay was the featured author for the On Carefree Black Girls panel. Her book Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture came out Oct. 19 from Macmillan imprint St. Martin’s Griffin. In conversation with Marjon Carlos, Zeba said she had to revisit her younger self who depended on the internet to collage images of Black women and inform her cultural understanding that led to her pop culture writing career.

“In writing this book, I was thinking a lot about my childhood, that younger Z who created the life I am living now and didn’t even know it,” she said. “I went through my old LiveJournal because that Live Journal was my life and I was astonished to see I was posting very similar mood boards in a different format.”

#BlackGirlMagic creator CaShawn Thompson discussed her children’s book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Real-Life Tales of Black Girl Magic edited by Lilly Workneh in partnership with edutainment publisher Rebel Girls. The book features stories for girls ages six and up on groundbreaking Black women like singer Aretha Franklin, tennis player Naomi Osaka, and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm.

“Girlhood is a universal experience, but even in that, it happens in so many ways, so I had a real keen understanding after doing the work of putting this book together is that girlhood, much like womanhood, looks like a lot of different things, but it all leads us to who we eventually will become,” CaShawn said. “I felt like having a book that exposes the girls to the many ways that we show up would give them a wider and deeper breadth of what they can possibly become when they grow up.”

Festival sponsors include Rebel Girls, 4 Color Books, The New York Times, and HarperCollins Publishers along with partner indie bookstores Reparations Club in Los Angeles, Mahogany Books and Loyalty Bookstores in D.C., Café Con Libros in Brooklyn, and Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery in Chicago. Brooklyn-based Center for Fiction provided the space for the festival events.

WRBG announced this week it has partnered with podcast and audiobook producer Pushkin Industries for a podcast to debut in February 2022.

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Book Review: ‘You Got Anything Stronger?’ by Gabrielle Union

You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories by Gabrielle Union

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

You Got Anything Stronger? by Gabrielle Union picks up right where we leave off from her first autobiographical story collection and takes us on her adventure of learning from life’s most impactful moments.

Her 2017 memoir We’re Going to Need More Wine made headlines with the author’s admission of losing count of her numerous miscarriages. The second book begins with her fertility struggles and her decision to choose surrogacy. She takes us down the journey of selecting the right surrogate mother and how many women look for a surrogate by targeting Black and Brown women’s wombs to house their fetuses, which informs her decision of who will be the best vessel for her daughter Kaavia James.

The chapter highlights her continuous fertility struggles, including her adenomyosis diagnosis that comes after her in vitro fertilization attempts never worked successfully. And she addresses the hardship of trying to get pregnant while her basketballer husband Dwyane Wade had a baby with another woman during a time she calls a bad place in their relationship before marriage. She talks about the pain of not birthing a child as her partner can conceive a child—a topic she says she didn’t feel comfortable discussing in her previous book. We also revisit her rape in college when she was working at a Payless ShoeSource by following the aftermath and healing process as she stays glued to watching the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona.

Surprisingly, one of the poignant chapters is a heartfelt letter dedicated to Isis, Gabrielle’s pivotal character in the 2000 cheerleader flick Bring It On. Isis leads the East Compton Clovers to victory after finding out the Rancho Carne Toros led by Kirsten Dunst’s character Torrance have copied the all-Black cheerleading team’s moves for years. The actress goes into the awkwardness of being the only Black person at the audition rehearsing stereotypical slang. Once she nabs the role along with Clover characters named Jenelope, Lava, and LaFred, played by the R&B girl group Blaque, Gabrielle finds herself every day editing the script to subtract the slang she knows wouldn’t come out of Isis’ mouth. She even reveals how she worked out a storyline for Isis to go to a top university, but it didn’t make the cut. Twenty years later, Isis is a mainstay on the top movie villains lists every year, a downer for Gabrielle who felt she let down Black teen girls by not making sure Isis deserved role model status. This motivates her to become a better role model for her daughters Kaavia and Zaya.

Her relationships with her daughters are interlaced in the stories. While she talks about her journey to mothering Kaavia, she also talks about her journey in understanding Zaya’s gender and sexual identity. She is a supportive stepmother with going to the school administrations whenever the family moves due to Dwyane’s basketball career to explain Zaya’s preferences. Those preferences evolve until Zaya realizes she is a transgender girl. And with that evolution comes the family’s evolution in creating a safe space for Zaya and asking others to do the same.

Stories with heartache sit between comedic chapters like when Gabrielle takes a laxative before going to the strip club that turns into a night in the strippers’ dressing room with a cold compress on her forehead to when her younger sister gets drunk off frozen limoncello at Thanksgiving that Gabrielle made after seeing Danny DeVito blame his televised drunkenness on the alcohol.

Overall, the memoir is another well-written collection of stories from different times and themes throughout the author’s life. Via the audiobook, her voice comes alive with the storytelling and the brilliant choice of words.



View all my reviews

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Tamron Hall’s New Novel ‘As the Wicked Watch’ Taps Into Her Crime Reporter Experience

TAMRON HALL - 9/29/21 - "Tamron Hall," airs weekdays in syndication on ABC. (ABC/Jeff Neira) TAMRON HALL

Talk show host Tamron Hall has the book of the week with her debut novel about a crime journalist seeking justice for Black female victims of a serial killer.

As The Wicked Watch, published by HarperCollins’ William Morrow and Company imprint, is the first of a series in which Tamron said she plans to write six books.

“For Jordan, she is a much braver reporter than I was at the beginning of my career,” she said at the National Black Book Festival recently held live on Facebook in conversation with author Rhonda M. Lawson. “First of all, she has a background that I don’t have; she is a forensic scientist who has found herself tapped to be a reporter… I wanted to created this protagonist who had this level of expertise that’s not often seen in thrillers.”

The book centers on Jordan Manning who arrives at a Chicago news station with her eye on the anchor chair. Jordan’s forensic science background blended with her journalistic prowess motivates her to cover murder victims, particularly Black women. But when she comes across the case of a Black girl abandoned in a parking lot, the lack of coverage elsewhere and the collective amnesia drives Jordan to seek who is responsible for the girl’s murder.

Timing of the novel’s release this week coincides with the national discussion around missing and murdered women of color falling out of the media spotlight. The conversation was sparked by the death of White blogger Gabby Petito that dominated headlines over the last month.

Pulling from her real-life experience as not only a reporter but also as the sister of a murder victim, Tamron said she wished she exhibited the boldness of her main character.

“She’s able to call things out in the newsroom and call out things when she goes in, for example, what appears to be a crime scene from this perspective,” Tamron said of Jordan at the book festival. “She also recognizes through something that happened to her in her past the sensitivity that family members of victims deserves. And in this case, she befriends a mother who is looking for justice and she does cross lines between what is the lane a reporter should occupy versus what is the lane a human should occupy.”

Covering crime impacts Jordan’s relationships and love life and stimulates distrust with others, Tamron said, also adding that a reporter’s support system and mental health may not be stable while they’re working on traumatic stories. The National Association of Black Journalists provides resources to Black journalists coping with everyday stressors inside and outside the newsroom.

Since the book festival mainly serves self-published Black authors, Tamron said she would like to highlight more of this population who wouldn’t be recognized in mainstream media. She also acknowledged that her ties with her talent agent who connected her to a literary agent then a publisher is a privilege many authors of color do not have.

“Like in any industry, I believe we are underrepresented on the agent level; I don’t see a lot of Black book agents,” she said, adding she is a newbie still navigating the publishing industry. “You have to have advocates in the room, and we need more advocates of power whether they are agents or publishers in the rooms to make sure Black content creators, Black writers are represented.”

Tamron is also planning a children’s book inspired by her infant son Moses.

The second book in the Jordan Manning series is in the works, she said.

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Singer Solange’s Saint Heron Curates Rare Black Books With New Library

Another artist has created an online library featuring rare works by Black and Brown authors. Two weeks after indie rapper Noname announced the opening of her book club’s Radical Hood Library, singer and songwriter Solange Knowles’ platform opened the Saint Heron Community Library on Monday.

The library will have a guest curator per season with Rosa Duffy, the founder of Atlanta-based For Keeps Books, handpicking the first round of works. This season’s selections include Audre Lorde’s 1976 poetry collection Coal, Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry collection Children Coming Home, Ntozake Shange’s poetry collection A Daughter’s Geography, Octavia E. Butler’s sci-fi novel Clay’s Ark, and Rita Dove’s story collection Fifth Sunday.

“The digital Library will spark new conversations about the breadth of rich artistic expression and the impact of black identity in creative innovation throughout history,” reads a post on Solange’s Instagram account.  

In an interview with Saint Heron Community Library’s editorial manager Shantel Aurora-Pass, Rosa said she took particular interest in elevating the access to books that have become less and less accessible to Black readers.

“When people ask the purpose or mission of the space, it’s true accessibility because all of this stuff has existed for all of these years, it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere,” she said. “But the truth is that it’s either hoarded, or we just don’t know much about it. The folks that know its value sometimes are the ones that are keeping it from the people that it’s made for.”

The library went live via Saint Heron’s website on Oct. 18. As of Oct. 19, all 50 books are unavailable. Books are free to be borrowed by U.S. residents for a maximum of 45 days. Physical books are being sent to borrowers via Worldnet, which will provide shipping and return postage costs, according to Saint Heron’s Instagram.

Earlier this month, Noname announced the opening of Radical Hood Library, a brick and mortar in Los Angeles with a mostly rare collection of books by Black and Brown authors that’s also available for online borrowing through the library catalog app Libib.

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Noname Celebrates Opening of the Radical Hood Library

Book Club Headquarters - Radical Hood Library / Instagram

Indie rapper and book club innovator Noname announced the opening of Book Club Headquarters: Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles Saturday.

In a flyer, the library asked for donations of new and used books preferably written by Black and Brown authors, especially novels and children’s books. The library is a “black led organization that was created to service black/brown folks,” according to its book.clubhq Instagram account. Online, books can be checked out through the library’s Libib account.

The opening was an RSVP’d event. The library’s address has yet to be revealed publicly.

The daughter of a Black-owned bookstore owner, Noname started the Noname Book Club in 2019 to highlight “reading material for the homies” by exposing Black and Brown readers to books of today and yesterday that explore intersectionality. The book club now has 12 metro chapters across the U.S. and a prison program that delivers book club selections to incarcerated peoples.

Every month, Noname picks a book and a book club member aka “homie” picks one. Socially distanced in-person and virtual meetings are ongoing this month for September’s books: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’shaun L. Harrison, Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon, and The Skin I’m in by Sharon G. Flake.

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From the Editor: Diversifying the #TBR List to Add More Books by Latina Authors

woman in white dress shirt and black pants lying on bed reading book
Photo by Los Muertos Crew on Pexels.com

For Banned Books Week, One World authors discussed what they wished they had learned in school. As in what they felt was missing from their yearslong education presumably from kindergarten to college. The conversation centered on the absence of racial and ethnic groups that make up the fabric of the United States and the context of discrimination against these groups. English and history classes became a target where authors said they didn’t recall reading works by entire groups of people, their voices missing from our curriculums.

We’re in the midst of National Hispanic American Heritage Month. From Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, we as a country are celebrating the histories, cultures, and contributions of Americans whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. The middle of September marks the independence days for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Chile.

I don’t read enough books by Latina authors. I started she lit to document my adventures of becoming a published author like blogging about the literary industry conferences and networking events I attended in Los Angeles. One factor I realized as a future author is the necessity to read current works. That’s when I noticed the diversity and inclusion conversation in book publishing. And that’s when I realized I read mostly books by men because that was what was marketed to me the most, recommended to me the most. When I started adding more books by women to my #ToBeRead list, I added books by Black women because as a Black woman who had attended predominantly White schools, I rarely had the opportunity to invest the time into reading books by women whose experiences I can identify with.

The disappointing realization that I need to read more books by Latinas occurred to me months ago while examining my book collection. Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies and Yo! stared at me from my bookshelf, both fixtures that have been there for years, but the time to read them always slips away. I reread The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros a few years ago since we share Chicago roots, and I had to experience her part of Chicago again. The thick hardcover of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés sits unread though I bought it last year to replace the paperback Jada Pinkett Smith gifted my class at Spelman College that later made its way to the jungles of Africa with my sister. It didn’t return intact.

As a challenge, I read three books in a row:

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

Other content related to Latina authors you can find on she lit include:

Why the Latinx Literary Community Is Warning Us About ‘American Dirt’

Book Review: ‘Sabrina & Corina’ by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

‘The View’ Co-Host Sunny Hostin Gushes Over Debut Novel

Book Launch: ‘The Education of Margot Sanchez’ by Lilliam Rivera

I look forward to blogging about more works by Latina authors, and diversifying that list even more since many of the ones I have read recently are of Dominican descent. Like many readers open to broadening their perspectives, there is always room for improvement. Leave a comment below on the books you recommend by Latina authors 👇🏾

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

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

One World hosted an event Wednesday featuring some of the most celebrated and debated authors of our time for a conversation on what they wished they had learned during their youth.

In honor of Banned Books Week, the Random House imprint invited authors via pre-recorded video interviews such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Bryan Stevenson to mark the “annual celebration of the freedom to read” from Sept. 26 to Oct. 2.

“Banning books is something that’s happened for many, many years and then there’s also the long-standing practice of omitting entire histories and identities from school curriculum around this country, as well as the fact that many books simply never get published,” said event co-host Elizabeth Méndez Berry, the One World vice president and executive editor. “One World authors, many of them have actually dedicated their lives to writing the books that they were not able to read coming up.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, said she learned how histories and cultures were wiped away from her schooling when she was younger.

“I didn’t remember if there were certain books my schools were prohibited from teaching us when I was a child, but I do know that there were entire histories, and peoples, that were simply erased,” she said. “I was taught about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and how they were men who made their living off of human bondage, and that their primary occupation was that of being a slave owner.”

The New York Times journalist and Howard University professor also mentioned how Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and other books have been banned from prisons. Helping place books in prisoners’ hands has become a growing civil rights issue with groups such as Noname Book Club starting a program to send books monthly to incarcerated readers.

Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, said she didn’t learn about Bacon’s Rebellion until she was learning about labor history in her twenties. The rebellion, which occurred in 1676 ignited by colonists’ failure to steal Native American lands, resulted in the burning of Virginia’s capital of Jamestown and united White indentured servants and Black slaves.

“Once the rebellion was crushed, the colonial plantation elite decided they needed to drive a permanent wedge between White and Black workers to keep them from ever joining forces against them,” she said. “Again, the post-Bacon laws in large part created the system of racial hierarchy that we take for granted as part of our history.” 

For modern history, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning author Cathy Park Hong said she didn’t recall learning in school about the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japanese Americans living in World War II internment camps seemed like a “footnote.”

“In all of my English classes, I don’t recall reading a single novel or short story, or even a poem by an Asian American author,” she said. “Because of this, it took me a long time to realize I had permission to be a writer, because for so long, I didn’t think I had a place in American literature because I had no role models. In my history classes, too, I learned very little, if anything, about Asians in America.” 

Race and ethnicity in America wasn’t the only theme. Golem Girl: A Memoir author Riva Lehrer discussed her experience growing up disabled in the 1960s. She said though she went to a top school that wouldn’t put her on the path to becoming a sweatshop worker, there weren’t many discussions on what path she should take.

“What we didn’t get was any idea of what we could be in the world,” said Riva, a queer painter. “We got no encouragement to dream, to think about wanting be an engineer or a doctor or a botanist or all the things that would have been open to people back then at a normal school.”

Banned Books Week started in 1982 after the surge in more books being challenged by schools, libraries, and bookstores around the U.S. The top 10 challenged books of last year can be found here. The event is on YouTube.

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‘The Perfect Find’ Lands New Home at Grand Central Publishing

Originally released under an indie publisher, best-selling author Tia Williams’ novel The Perfect Find is being re-released via Grand Central Publishing.

The top publisher released Tia’s latest novel Seven Days in June this summer. The book made The New York Times Best Sellers list and became Reese’s Book Club’s June selection.

Published in 2016, The Perfect Find came out under Brown Girls Books managed by authors ReShonda Tate Billingsley and Victoria Christopher Murray. Victoria currently has a NY Times best-seller out now called The Personal Librarian co-authored by Marie Benedict. On its website, the publisher says it’s not currently accepting submissions.

Tia’s book will be turned into an upcoming Netflix film starring Gabrielle Union, Gina Torres, La La Anthony, and Aisha Hinds. Announcing production wrapped last month on Instagram, Gabrielle also serves as a producer as she starts her own book tour for her second memoir You Got Anything Stronger? this month. In her Instagram post on Wednesday, Tia revealed the film is expected to be available for streaming next spring.

The new version of The Perfect Find will be on bookshelves Sept. 14, according to the author’s post.

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‘Black Girls Must Die Exhausted’ Sees New Release With Harper Perennial

A HarperCollins Publishers imprint is breathing new life into an independent book that became a hit via word of mouth.

Jayne Allen calls her book, Black Girls Must Die Exhausted, “chocolate chick lit with a conscience.” Originally published in 2018 with indie publisher Quality Black Books, the book is now under the Harper Perennial umbrella with a new release today.

The book became an internet sensation especially among Black female readers and their book clubs.
 
“I want you to know this story because it is truly our story,” the author wrote in an Instagram post in February announcing the new edition. She continues her post with adding what she has heard from readers over the years.

Together, we made change happen in the publishing industry and hand-in-hand, we’ll keep the tides of progress rolling in. You took a risk on a little independent project with a funny title. You read in bookclubs, in bathtubs and in bed, on subways and on sofas. You have written hundreds of reviews and spread the word through gorgeous posts and generous words. You gave this life.

Black Girls Must Die Exhausted revolves around a 30-something Black female TV reporter in Los Angeles struggling with her dating life while yearning for a baby as her biological clock ticks. She realizes her friends are in the same boat. The she lit book review is here from the original publishing. The book may be different with the new publisher.

The former version of the book will be retired as Harper Perennial plans to release the next two books in the series in 2022, according to the author.
 

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How ‘Younger’ Painted an Insanely Glamorous, Somewhat Diverse Publishing World

TV Land

Spoiler alert: The post below reveals storylines from the seventh season of Younger.

Literary industry cable series Younger wrapped up a successful seven seasons this summer. Though racial and ethnic diversity took a backseat to the storylines, the show still put diversity and inclusion in the forefront of an industry struggling to fulfill its promises.

Created by Sex and the City and Beverly Hills 90210 visionary Darren Star, Younger follows a 40-something White woman named Liza Miller, played by Broadway veteran Sutton Foster, who knocks her age down to 26 to get her foot back into the door of the publishing industry after raising her daughter and divorcing her husband. Based on Pamela Redmond Satran’s 2005 novel of the same name, the show started on TV Land in 2015 and moved to Paramount+ this year.

The show featured diversity markers, mainly with age and gender, in a fictional publishing scene made to look obscenely glamorous. Recent data from Lee & Low Books finds that the literary industry as a whole is 74% cisgender female, but when it comes to executive leadership positions, the number is down to 60%. On Younger, the main female characters are striving to retain and maintain leadership throughout the series to elevate works by women.

Amplifying younger voices

“Younger” Ep. 603 (Airs 6/26/19)

After lying about her age, Liza earns the coveted job of an editorial assistant at traditional publishing powerhouse Empirical. To make matters more complicated, Liza is paired up with actual 26-year-old Kelsey Peters, played by Hilary Duff, whose ambition oozes to make books more appealing to millennials.

This eventually leads to the two creating an imprint called Millennial, not only multiplying books by Gen Y authors but also taking a focus on female authors in the age group. As they are underestimated by Empirical and the industry at large, Liza and Kelsey build a behemoth of an imprint that in its final season begins suffering from hits by Empirical’s old White male investors.

This motivated the pair to create Inkubator, a spoken word event series featuring promising millennial authors ready to have their work published.

Women supporting women

“Younger” Ep. 501 (Airs 6/5/18)

Helping Liza and Kelsey on their literary adventures and misadventures are editor Diana Trout, known for her brusqueness and over-the-top statement necklaces, who is played by Miriam Shor who did not return for the final season; Lauren Heller, the carefree bisexual social media enthusiast played by Molly Bernard who replaces Diana’s presence in the Empirical office as an assistant; and Maggie Amato, the lesbian artist played by legend Debi Mazar who owns the fabulous loft they all seem to live in at one point in the series.

They become this unbreakable group, along with one man—Liza’s millennial ex, Josh, played by Nico Tortorella, a tattoo artist entrepreneur with a heart of gold. Liza goes back and forth with Josh and Empirical’s editor in chief, Charles Brooks, the well-meaning head honcho who is age-appropriate for Liza played by Peter Hermann. Having sexual relations with the boss while editing his ex-wife’s novel is one of the situations that comes up with the ill-begotten romance between Liza and Charles. This novel leaped offscreen onto our bookshelves as Marriage Vacation reviewed by she lit.

With all the drama mostly involving Liza’s back-and-forth relationships, the girl group feeds on their mistakes with men and women. The girlboss-in-making Kelsey seems to be pick the men who want to compete with her success in one way or another, with one ill-fated relationship leading to a death by scaffolding (very NYC) and an evil twin (very soapy). As Liza and Kelsey lean on Maggie, Lauren, and Diana, they also support female writers with some of the most familiar scenes of the series occurring in the closed office session with a new writer who is revolutionizing the newer subgenres, e.g. sick lit, teen environmentalist memoir, and boomer erotica.

Shelving racial diversity

“Younger” Ep. 612 (Airs 9/04/19)

The show’s cast is all-White, which is normal on TV shows to have an entire cast of the same racial makeup, but it resonates with the real-life publishing industry, unfortunately. The show failed to right this diversity and inclusion oversight with its choice of guest stars in earlier seasons.

Charles Michael Davis, who played Kelsey’s frenemy lover Zane Anders for three seasons, added much-needed melanin as a regular cast member, but he and his character had to depart in the final season due to his commitment to NCIS: New Orleans. As his character left the script, the show featured two writer characters who contributed to Millennial’s next phase.

Dylan Park, played by Yeena Sung, appeared in “The F Word,” the episode that introduces Inkubator. She is a future author with a novel that Kelsey and Liza try to get published through Empirical since Millennial by this time has been absorbed into the publisher thanks to the investors’ wishes. But editor in chief Charles is not interested, so Kelsey and Liza have the novel published by a release of a chapter every week in The Cut. Though an Asian American millennial female author is brought into the storyline, she only makes one appearance, failing to become a substantive character while her book really becomes the character.

The final season then brings in another author of color, Azealia King, played by De’Adre Aziza, a Black woman who has won the National Book Award. She’s so impressive that Charles wants to publish her next book. Her character appears in the last two episodes, almost as if the writer’s room realized they didn’t have enough female authors of color featured throughout the series.

Out of an industry that is 74% cisgender female, publishing is 76% White, according to the Lee and Low Books’ report. Numbers for professionals of color are broken down by 7% Asian descent, 6% Latino/Latina, 5% African descent, and less than 1% Native American and Middle Eastern.

Despite the diversity successes and failures of imagining the cutthroat Manhattan book publishing scene into an addictive summer TV series, the show still gives feel-good vibes and is expertly written with relatable moments. Live or relive the half-hour series on Paramount+ and Hulu.

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Marketing Maven Bozoma Saint John Teases New Memoir

Bozoma Saint John, the chief marketing officer of streaming service Netflix, announced she has officially joined the author family at Penguin Random House.

In an Instagram post, she shared a snapshot of an email from the publisher welcoming her to the author portal, where she will access information such as her sales and royalties. She revealed her book, The Urgent Life, is coming out next year courtesy of Viking Books, a Penguin imprint.

“I’m really writing y’all,” she wrote Wednesday. “And then one day, you’ll see my vulnerable words in print 🤯 This is truly one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.”

On a recent podcast episode with broadcast journalist Catt Sadler, Bozoma says the book will focus on her journey of grief after losing her husband to lymphoma within six months of his diagnosis in 2013. She tells Catt that she used social media to share the journey with loved ones until they told her she should piece the content together for a book after her husband’s death. But she wasn’t ready.

“He’s been gone for seven years, and I feel like the time is right now,” Bozoma says. “I’m in a really great place spiritually, where the mantra that I live my life with now is to live life urgently, so the book is called The Urgent Life, which is really about the pace at which he lived his last months and we lived it together… It’s not about speed, it was about the intention, the intentionality of how we did it.”

The book does not have a public title page yet on the Penguin website, but comparative titles include actress Tembi Locke’s From Scratch, also a forthcoming Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana, and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B.

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We Need Diverse Books Stops Using #OwnVoices Term

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The nonprofit initiative to have more children’s books reflect all identities in the literary industry says it will no longer use the #OwnVoices hashtag.

We Need Diverse Books announced Sunday that it has scrubbed mentions of the #OwnVoices hashtag from its website posts and plan to identify authors and their characters specifically by their race, ethnicity, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and gender.

The term #OwnVoices became an industry standard when fantasy and sci-fi young adult novelist Corinne Duyvis suggested the hashtag on Twitter in September 2015 to label kidlit work by mostly non-White authors writing about characters that share their identity. It has evolved into a mainstay in the book Twitterverse, particularly as a preferred hashtag in pitch parties such as #PitMad and #DVPit where authors query their books in 280 characters to attract literary agents. Many literary agents still ask for the term to be included in subject lines for authors who are querying their work via email.

“I’m thrilled that #ownvoices has taken on its own life in the years since then,” Corinne writes on her website. “It’s easy shorthand for a necessary concept, and the hashtag is filled with brilliant recommendations, questions, and discussions. That’s awesome. I’m happy to [sic] for the Tweets above to be the extent of my involvement, as the hashtag has been doing just fine without my input; I don’t want to moderate or regulate the discussion in any way.”

We Need Diverse Books says the term was never supposed to grow into an industry marketing “catchall.”

“Using #OwnVoices in this capacity raises issues due to the vagueness of the term, which has then been used to place diverse creators in uncomfortable and potentially unsafe situations,” the organization writes. “It is important to use the language that authors want to celebrate about themselves and their characters.”

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Gold House Releases Second Book Club List Featuring Asian Pacific Islander Authors

On the heels of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Gold House launched its second book club list on Tuesday selecting stories that explore identity written by Asian Pacific Islander authors.

A part of the largest nonprofit collective of top Asian and Pacific Islander cultural leaders, the book club list highlights works to emphasize this year’s “Resistance & Resilience” theme.

“Through the selection of books in our second Reading List, we will explore ways in which ‘Resistance and Resilience’ forges Asian American identity, particularly through the lens of grief, oppression, and cultural assimilation,” says Cindy Joung, Gold House’s Gold Records director, in a statement.

The book club list is as follows:

June 2021: Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner

July 2021: Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

August 2021: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

September 2021: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston 

October 2021: America Is in the Heart: A Personal History by Carlos Bulosan

November 2021: This Is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah

“At a time when many Asians and Asian Americans are feeling unsafe, unseen, and unwelcome in this country, the Gold House Book Club seeks to share stories that exemplify our strength, our contributions, and our multifaceted identities,” Cindy says. “Ultimately, we hope these books and our programming will bring the community together for moments of introspection and discussion while highlighting API representation in the literary landscape.”

The list was curated by Gold House’s advisory council of 22 API writers, activists, and professors, including celebrated authors Amy Tan, Helen Zia, and Viet Nguyen.

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

Netflix

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.

“I started to ask her about her life, and I listened instead of saying, ‘I’m really busy now. I can’t listen to you,'” Amy says in the documentary. “I would listen to everything and that profoundly changed everything. I wasn’t fighting it anymore. And I learned a lot by simply being quiet and actually listen.”

The Joy Luck Club became an instant sensation resonating across cultures with the common thread of generational trauma.

“It gives you curiosity; you want to ask questions you want to understand and in the answers you get stories,” says author Isabel Allende in the documentary. “That’s what Amy has been doing. She observes her mother and her aunts and the culture and at the same time she totally belongs here. So it’s in the conscience, in the complexity that she finds her language, her inspiration.”

Four years later in 1993, the book became the first film to feature a majority Asian American cast. That success wouldn’t be repeated until 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians based on Kevin Kwan’s first book in his soapy series.

“Not to do any disservice to the amazing Asian American writers that came before Amy, but I think this is the first book that really crossed over into becoming a mainstream mass market success. It had such a huge impact on paving the way for other writers of color to tell their stories,” Kevin says in the documentary. He adds he saw the film five times in the theater growing up in Texas where all his friends were White, but he was proud to be able to show them “English-speaking contemporary Asians.”

The novel has also seen its critics who Amy says believed she had used ethnic tropes like starting the novel with a fake Chinese folktale to portraying the grandmother as a concubine who commits suicide. Except the tropes Amy is accused of putting in her book actually happened to her family and in her life, she says.

“When I was given this mantle for speaking for the Asian American community, suddenly there were these expectations. I started getting a lot of criticism. Some said I did it wrong, that I had created stereotypes and pandered to those,” Amy says. “Mothers speaking in broken English, or concubines who had killed themselves. These were stereotypes.

“In the beginning, I didn’t know what to say. I would be caught off-guard,” she adds, “but then I realized that they wanted really was role models. They wanted me to right the social wrongs, the social injustices and finally they had someone in the limelight who should now address that and not be pandering, so to speak, to the mainstream.”

Besides The Joy Luck Club, Amy is the author of seven other books, including memoirs and children’s books.

Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir is streaming now on Netflix.

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#StopAsianHate Anti-Racism Literary Posts to Check Out

phrase racism is pandemic on signboard
Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

The mass shooting in the Atlanta area that took the lives of eight people, mostly women of Asian descent, on Tuesday has devastated the nation. On a weekend that will be marked with anti-Asian racism protests, we must acknowledge the uptick of violence against Asian Americans in the past year due to how the last presidential administration purported the root of the COVID-19 pandemic.

she lit celebrates the literary lifestyle with a focus on stories written by women of color. The content leans toward the contributions of Black women since it’s headed by a Black woman, but we’re always open to more stories uplifting the literary works of all women, womxn, and womyn. Below are a few past posts that can help you seek out stories focusing on the Asian American female perspective.

Kidlit Author Kelly Yang Says She Was Called a Racial Slur While Teaching Class

At the beginning of the pandemic, authors donated their time to teach students in virtual classrooms. But some female authors of color like Kelly Yang said she saw a student call her a “Chinese virus” in the Zoom chat. She said she received an apology days later after going public, but the incident shows how children are being taught to hate.

Book Review: ‘Know My Name’ by Chanel Miller

For years, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, the young woman who had been raped by Stanford University swimming standout Brock Turner. His six-month sentence that was shortened into a three-month jail term resulted in national outrage. As the outrage simmered down on the cusp of the #MeToo movement, Chanel revealed her true identity and released her memoir soon after. She talks about her yearslong ordeal and how she felt being half Chinese fueled the anxiety of telling her story as a rape victim. Best on audiobook in which she narrates.

Book Review: ‘Minor Feelings’ by Cathy Park Hong

Author Cathy Park Hong wrote a series of essays exploring her Asian identity and what it means to be an Asian American woman. She examines her upbringing in Los Angeles, particularly during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising that pitted the African American and Korean American communities against each other that culminated in a catastrophic loss to Korean businesses. Coining the phrase “minor feelings” for Asian women’s stories failing to be magnified in the public, she also remembers Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean-American writer and artist who was murdered in 1982, and Yuri Kochiyama, the Japanese-American activist who worked with Malcolm X and was present at his assassination.

‘The Claudia Kishi Club’ Shows Love to Beloved ‘Baby-sitters Club’ Member

For a lighter piece, Asian American creatives discuss their favorite The Baby-Sitters Club member, the artistically fabulous Claudia Kishi. They mention the Japanese American character’s contributions such as offering the bedroom for club meetings and the private line used to conduct business. Author Ann M. Martin created a character who fought model minority stereotypes like Claudia’s inaptitude for math, but racial stereotypes remained between the pages like the forever description of Claudia’s eyes as “almond-shaped.” The Netflix documentary is 17 minutes, so a perfect quick show to check out as you Netflix and chill.

Gold House Book Club Plans to Explore Works by Asian Writers

Gold House, a nonprofit collective celebrating the contributions of Asian American artists, started a book club last fall. With the inaugural selection of Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club, the book club is designed to read works by writers of Asian descent and discuss the stories and their cultural impact. If you’re looking for anti-Asian racism literary resources, check out the book club’s picks.

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Can You Tell Your Story Your Way? Mariah Carey Faces Lawsuits From Siblings Over Her Memoir

Songstress Mariah Carey enjoyed debut author success when her long-awaited memoir hit bookshelves last September. But the memoir that dives deep into how she found her voice in what she calls an abusive family environment has led to lawsuits from her siblings.

While promoting The Meaning of Mariah Carey with Oprah Winfrey on an Apple TV+ special last fall, Mariah said after years of therapy she calls Alison her “ex-sister” and Morgan her “ex-brother.” Her so-called former siblings now are suing her in New York Supreme Court over allegedly false and defamatory claims.

News broke this week that Morgan Carey, Mariah’s older brother, filed a lawsuit on March 3 against Mariah, co-author Michaela Angela Davis, Andy Cohen of Bravo fame whose imprint published the book, and Macmillan Publishers that owns Andy Cohen Books. Mariah’s older sister, Alison Carey, also had filed her own lawsuit on Feb. 3 solely against Mariah.

In the memoir, the singer describes several alleged violent interactions with her siblings. From the descriptions, lawsuits were expected, but it begs the question of how a memoirist can write her own story and portray real-life characters the way she interpreted their behavior and personality.

What Are the Allegations?

First, in Alison’s two-page complaint, she is representing herself and asking the court to have her sister pay $1.25 million in damages plus money for legal costs. She has issue with the chapter in Mariah’s memoir called “Dandelion Tea,” which is dedicated to Mariah’s allegedly dangerous experiences with her sister, who she claims tossed boiling hot water on her when she was 12 years old that made her black out and develop third-degree burns.

Alison says she was a troubled preteen, but she blames their mother, Patricia Carey, for allegedly forcing her to “attend terrifying middle-of-the-night satanic worship meetings that included ritual sacrifices and sexual activity.” Alison goes on to write that she has been diagnosed with a series of mental and physical health diseases. She says Mariah “used her status to attack her penniless sister” and “callously dismisses” her as an ex-sister.

Morgan also references in his lawsuit about being called publicly by Mariah as her ex-brother. He claims Mariah falsely depicted him as a “physically violent man.” In his own words, he alleges their father, Alfred Roy Carey, was the abuser and the reason he was placed in a children’s psychiatric center, a revelation Morgan says is an invasion of privacy. He says he believes he was portrayed as a stereotypical violent Black male for Mariah to “play the victim card and curry favor with the Black Lives Matter movement.” As part of the lawsuit, he attached a page of photos from over Mariah’s career of them together appearing happy to dispute his sister’s allegations.

Memory or Mismemory?

Memoirists have to reach for memories and describe those memories and the meaning behind what happened and how it impacted their lives. But as humans our minds may misinterpret an old memory and transform it. That’s a concern that impacts any writer writing their own true story.

“This is because memory is not just about retrieving stored information,” reads a Scientific American article on the unintentional phenomenon of misremembering, or the act of remembering incorrectly. “Our minds normally construct memories using a blend of remembered experiences and knowledge about the world. Our memories can be frazzled, though, by new experiences that end up tangling the past and the present.”

Should a writer discuss what they plan to tell in their story with people who will have a major appearance? It’s a question about how much to reveal about someone and how similar are the memories you share with that someone to ensure the right description makes it into the book. But if you’re not close to that particular someone, then reaching out can get murky. Also, reaching out could mean that someone wants their name and any reference to the event they’re mentioned in to be out of the book, subtracting some of the author’s freedom to express their story.

Your Truth or Their Truth?

Both of Mariah’s siblings say they weren’t contacted by the press for their sides of the story nor were given a copy of the unpublished book to verify any information.

There are memoirs, especially celebrity ones, that share private information about others without substituting names. Actress Demi Moore in her 2019 memoir Inside Out, for example, wrote she had taken actor Jon Cryer’s virginity. This aspect, of course, exploded in the media, but Jon issued a correction on Twitter saying he lost his virginity in high school before meeting Demi.

For Demi, her mismemory was forgiven though it involved sexual information that’s usually preferred to remain private.

Mariah hints at the alleged situation with her family in “Petals” off her 1999 Rainbow album.

Who Will Win?

When the lawsuits spill in claiming false and defamatory statements after a memoir is published, it’s hard to say how the court battle will go down. Most lawsuits head toward settlement as in we may never hear the result of the settlement if Mariah and her siblings believe that’s the best route to resolution.

In 2003, Augusten Burroughs published his memoir, Running with Scissors, that mentioned his time living with a family that he gave a fictional name. In the family’s chapter, he recounts abuse, drug use, and overall dysfunction. The real family filed a defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuit against the author and his publisher St. Martin’s Press. The author argued his memories were as accurate as he remembered, therefore what he wrote was true. The $2 million lawsuit settled outside of court with the author saying in his apology that the family’s memories were “different from my own,” The New York Times reported in 2007. The memoir became a movie starring Alec Baldwin and Annette Bening.

Mariah told The Hollywood Reporter in December amid her Apple TV+ Christmas special that she’s in talks to adapt her memoir for the screen. This is before the lawsuits were filed that may or may not impact any future projects, especially around the division of profits if that becomes part of the probable settlements.

If you are working on a memoir and worried about your memories sparking lawsuits, here are some resources to check out:

A Writer’s Guide to Defamation and Invasion of Privacy, Writer’s Digest

How Not to Get Sued for Your Memoir, HuffPost

Writing Memoirs—What You Need to Know to Avoid Being Sued, Self Publishing School 

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Stacey Abrams Multiplies Book Deals While Raising Political Profile

Stacey Abrams on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Dec. 8, 2020. (ABC)

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams rose to prominence in 2018 as the first Black woman selected by a major party to vie for the highest position in her home state. But when she lost, she alleged voter suppression led to an unfair election. She started an organization and wrote a book about the ordeal but also saw another wave of popularity in 2020 for her contribution to the election of the future president.

Stacey is the prime example of a working woman who writes novels on her free time. She moonlights as a romance novelist under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery. As Selena, she has written four novels with HarperCollins Publishers. As Stacey, she has written two nonfiction best-sellers.

In January, Henry Holt and Co. announced Stacey would release a book in June during the height of the presidential election about her work to make voting equal for all Georgians. Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America is written like the average politico book discussing her upbringing but adds her journey in creating Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to promoting fair elections in Georgia and across the U.S., encouraging eligible adults to vote, and educating them on their voting rights.

On her media book tour earlier this year, the Yale-trained lawyer and Spelman Woman also motivated Americans to participate in the 2020 Census, which was impacted by the sudden COVID-19 pandemic in March. In her book, she recalls how Republicans such as outgoing President Donald Trump and conservative pundits badmouthed her for not conceding in her 2018 election.

My cardinal sin is that I have refused to concede the outcome of the 2018 gubernatorial contest, and I have made a crusade of calling out and defeating voter suppression. I do so as a private citizen, and this reality greets me every day. As I have traveled the country in the months since the election, I typically begin my speeches the same way. “I am not the governor of Georgia,” I tell the assembled crowds, to boos and hisses of support. Then I declare with equal conviction a truth I hold deep in my heart: “We won.”

Fast forward to November when Democratic President-elect Joe Biden grasped victory, and Stacey along with Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms were being thanked publicly by other Democrats and supporters who credited their campaigning to moving voters to the polls in a traditionally Republican red state in which Biden won the electoral votes. Though she said Trump ridiculed her for not conceding in her election, he has yet to concede in his latest election.

Soon after the election, Stacey notched another book deal. Doubleday and Anchor Books announced her new novel, While Justice Sleeps, a U.S. Supreme Court thriller expected to be on bookshelves by May 25, 2021. Doubleday will manage the first printing of 150,000 copies while the book will be published in hardcover,  e-book, and audiobook by Penguin Random House. The paperback version will be published by Anchor in 2022. A romance novelist, Stacey said she’s excited to join the legal thriller genre.

As an avid consumer of legal suspense novels and political thrillers, I am excited to add my voice into the mix. Drawing on my own background as a lawyer and politician, WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS weaves between the Supreme Court, the White House and international intrigue to see what happens when a lowly law clerk controls the fate of a nation.

As we wait for Stacey’s next book, she spent 2020 becoming an icon in the political world and in the literary world.

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Author Natasha Diaz Wants Us to Know Black Jewish Stories Matter

When Natasha Díaz discovered her debut novel was excluded from a Black Jewish book list, she went to Twitter to air her frustrations that led to a conversation on multiracial Jewish literature.

Natasha’s young adult novel Color Me In features a sixteen-year-old protagonist who moves in with Black mother’s family after her parents divorce, but her White Jewish father wants to throw her a belated bat mitzvah. The change in surroundings and circumstances heightens the racial and religious intolerance, according to the publisher Penguin Random House imprint Ember, but the teenager who’s usually quiet tries to find her voice amid the noise. On her author website, she says the book is “inspired by my experiences as a white passing, multiracial woman.”

In June, Natasha tweeted she had submitted the book that was first published in 2019 to the Association of Jewish Libraries for inclusion in its list of Black Jewish literature in light of the George Floyd protests. She said the association refused to add her book to the list.

The Association of Jewish Libraries created a list that includes the YA best-seller Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert, which comes from Little, Brown & Co. Books for Young Readers about a Black girl who’s trying to deal with her White Jewish stepbrother’s mental illness. The list is the seventh installment in the association’s Love Your Neighbor series, an initiative to promote works by Jewish authors in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh.

By mid-June, Natasha started a campaign asking for followers to amplify Black Jewish writers whether they were published or unpublished. Within two months, she penned the article “What It’s Like to Be a Black Jewish Writer” in Alma, a digital media outlet focused on pop culture content about Jewish women.

I never read a character who was grappling with where to fit, how to own her whole self, and also how to take accountability for white presenting privilege, in a book. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s my life, and while I was so incredibly proud to learn my book was “a first,” I couldn’t help but also feel infinitely sad that my Black Jewish experience, which is so impacted by my proximity to whiteness, is the only one to travel through the traditional publishing channels and represent young Black Jews in children’s literature.

In the article, she has a roundtable discussion that includes Marra Gad, the author of the award-winning memoir The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl from Agate Publishing, and Rachel Harrison-Gordon, the filmmaker behind Broken Bird about a Black Jewish girl preparing for her bat mitzvah. Also in August, Natasha was interviewed by the Jewish Book Council and discussed her book’s impact.

Perhaps one of the most visible Black Jewish authors is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of writing legend Alice Walker, who wrote about her multiethnic upbringing in her first memoir, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, published by Penguin Random House in 2002. Rebecca is the author and editor of seven books, including a debut novel called Adé: A Love Story, originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. and Amazon Publishing Co. in 2013. A year later, pop icon Madonna was set to direct a film based on the book.

Meanwhile, Natasha continues to discover and elevate multiracial and Black Jewish writers on social media who still battle deep-rooted hatred from within the White Jewish community and antisemitism outside the community.