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Tag: celebrity bookwomen
For a 2021 literary lookback, we noticed Phenomenal Media mature this year with the addition of a book club focused on exposing readers to works by underrepresented authors, particularly women of color.
The four-year-old company founded by Meena Harris launched the Phenomenal Book Club in November with choosing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and its young readers’ companion The 1619 Project: Born on the Water as the inaugural picks and inviting author and editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and illustrator Nikkolas Smith to a virtual event. Phenomenal Book Club was the exclusive book club partner for the books based on The New York Times project named after the year enslaved Africans first came to the U.S.
A bona fide social media star, lawyer, and activist, Meena is best known for being the niece of our first female, first Black, and first Asian second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her pro-vaccine Dec. 21 tweet announcing she has a breakthrough case of Covid-19 after receiving her booster shot went viral with over 70,000 likes. The success online, her family connections, and her entrepreneurial activism spirit has opened doors for her to grow her media company named after Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman.”
Besides her history-making aunt, Meena’s family tree also consists of her mother Maya Harris, who has also developed a reputation expressing her activism via Twitter as a lawyer and policy expert; her stepfather Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber; and her late grandmother Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist whose story is told in Kamala’s 2020 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.
Expressing activism through books
Like her aunt, Meena has a publishing career. She wrote two children’s books: Ambitious Girl, published by Little, Brown Young Readers and illustrated by Marissa Valdez, about a girl finding her journey to overcome the “too ambitious” label; and Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, published by HarperCollins’ imprint Balzer + Bray and illustrated by Ana Ramírez González, about the kid versions of her aunt and mother organizing their community. Both New York Times best-selling books came out in the last year and most likely served as inspiration for Phenomenal Book Club.
Meena’s company started in 2017 as Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a community-oriented organization focused on social causes mainly through message shirts. Top campaigns include the #PhenomenalVoter campaign to encourage voters to exercise their right in the 2018 midterm elections to the Justice for Breonna Taylor last year that manufactured shirts saying “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”
So far, the merch maker’s interaction with over 1,000 celebrities, athletes, and activists has catapulted it into a multimedia venture that also includes Phenomenal Productions that’s described as having “a specific emphasis on communities of color and underrepresented voting blocs.”
Curating books for children
The mother of two daughters, Meena has voiced her opinion that anti-racism works need to be incorporated into children’s libraries through their parents since schools on average have failed to add these works to their curricula. She wrote in The Washington Post op-ed published Nov. 15:
Of course, for Black and Brown parents, this isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Many of us have already taken it upon ourselves to give our children the full, accurate history lesson we know they must hear — just as our parents did for us, and their parents for them. But it’s time all American families start taking time at home to discuss the injustices that shaped our nation’s past, the work still to be done in our present, and the values that should define our future.
The new book club will announce selections quarterly and highlight a book already published between those selections. One of the missions of the book club is to aid the publishing industry in upholding its commitments to anti-racism and equity after the George Floyd protests.
Community chats last week were featured on the book club’s Instagram for its first highlight, Severance by Ling Ma, and promoting a giveaway on social media for 50 editions. For the holidays, Phenomenal is selling sweatshirts with a reproductive rights message and cookbooks by women of color.
*Spoilers ahead! Read Passing, then check out the book review on shelit.com and watch the film on Netflix*
Netflix Book Club uploaded its first video episode in a series looking at the streaming giant’s film adaptations based on popular books. The inaugural selection is the almost century-old novel Passing by Nella Larsen that became Netflix’s most recent book-to-film adaptation that started streaming last week.
Now live on Netflix’s YouTube and Facebook channels, “But Have You Read The Book?” is hosted by Orange Is the New Black star Uzo Aduba sitting down at Starbucks Reserve Roastery New York with Passing film director Rebecca Hall and actors Ruth Negga and André Holland.
The film stars Tessa Thompson playing Irene Redfield, a Black woman in 1929 Harlem, who bumps into childhood friend Clare Kendry Bellew, played by Ruth, as they realize though they’re of the same race they are living on separate sides of the color line with Clare passing as a White woman. Based on the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance royalty Nella Larsen, the film and the book explores a toxic friendship where the two main characters wonder if the grass is greener on the other side as their lives unravel amid the fear of Clare’s dangerous secret becoming public.
Rebecca starts the book club conversation with what she says became stringing together her own family history with her grandfather being African American but living as a White man in the U.K.
“I grew up looking at my mother, thinking you’re a Black woman, you look to me like a Black woman, but that’s not in your lexicon,” she says. “It’s not how you’re talking about yourself. It’s not how you’re living your life because she wasn’t given that because her father was passing.”
Once she read the book, she says she had a better understanding of the situation surrounding her grandfather and countless others like him.
“This book was a big turning point for me because I didn’t know that there was this word ‘passing,'” she says. “This was something that many, many, many people of color in this country did to get better lives for themselves.”
Passing, or assuming another usually racial identity based on appearance, became a pathway for people of color to pursue their dreams and unlock their potential, Ruth says.
“To be quite clear about passing, many times it wasn’t a rejection of yourself, your Black self,” she says. “It wasn’t a rejection of your Black culture at all. It was a choice to choose a path of access. Access to what we would call White privilege.”
While her character Clare is considered the main one passing, the book unpacks the layers of Irene as a person also passing but in a different sense, such as a wife and friend becoming unstable when she believes she sees sparks fly between Clare and her husband Brian, played by André.
“Clare is obviously passing,” Rebecca says. “She’s gay when she needs to be. She’s straight when she needs to be. She behaves like a man when she needs to be. She behaves like a woman when she needs to be. She’s Black. She’s White. She’s this walking duality.”
Tessa Thompson, adorned in a Chanel choker, reads an excerpt in her taped cameo from when her character Irene notices the piercing gaze from Clare in the hotel tearoom where they reconnect. Irene is distraught the stranger—who she doesn’t know is her old friend Clare—could tell she’s a Black woman passing to gain entry into the posh hotel.
For slight changes in the film, Rebecca talks about how she allows Irene to reveal to her White author friend Hugh Wentworth, played by Bill Camp, that Clare is passing as White. It’s a dangerous move that Irene barely dodges in the book, failing to remove any suspicion of Clare at a time when she seems to notice Clare’s charisma suck the air out of a room and leave Irene envious. The book has Irene wrestle with revealing Clare’s secret, knowing she has the ante to destroy her friend while she also wants to protect her friend.
Irene’s back-and-forth with herself doesn’t save Clare from her tragic demise after being found out by her White bigoted husband John, played by Alexander Skarsgård. As John bangs on the door of a party in Harlem full of Black guests, he darts toward Clare, calling her a liar. Clare positions herself in front of an open window to get away from John and closer to Irene, but the sway of arms somehow forces Clare to fall out of the fifth-story window and into the snow. But whose arm is at fault is a mystery in the book as well as the film.
“Nella Larsen keeps it ambiguous for a good reason,” Rebecca says. “She’s also pointing out that it doesn’t really matter because everyone is sort of complicit in something. And also whatever happened, Irene does feel like she was responsible.”
To sum up the story, Uzo says the phrase spoken by Irene when discussing Clare with Hugh about everything not appearing as it seems threads the film together.
“We’re watching characters who can exist and move through life in ways that might not be as they seem,” she says. “I think it was consistent with the larger narrative being told throughout.”
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
Today is the 25th anniversary of Waiting to Exhale‘s cinematic debut, a film that brought a never-before-seen look into the ’90s grown Black female experience. The timing coincides with author sisters Attica and Tembi Locke embarking on a project to bring Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel to TV. Currently in pre-production, the series is following in the footsteps of the 1995 film and adding the TV binge element to screen.
Mystery novelist and Empire screenwriter Attica Locke and her sister, memoirist and actress Tembi Locke, are under a script commitment with ABC and Empire creator Lee Daniels to bring the story to TV, according to Deadline. The entertainment website also noted in November that Terry McMillan will serve as a consulting producer. It’s been 25 years since Waiting to Exhale sparked a cultural phenomenon among Black female viewers who wanted to see their stories onscreen.
The film Waiting to Exhale starred the late singer Whitney Houston as Savannah, a TV producer who longs for a married man; Angela Bassett as Bernadine, a mother of two whose husband is leaving her for a White woman; Loretta Devine as Gloria, an overweight single mother who owns a hair salon; and Lela Rochon as Robin, an executive trying to elevate from mistress to wife. The story and film is set in Phoenix, Arizona, a city known for a low Black population but symbolically represents a phoenix rising from the ashes and starting over.
In Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s 2019 memoir Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America about being the first Black female reporter at The Washington Post, she discusses the cultural impact of the film that opened in theaters on Dec. 22, 1995. She recounts the moment with her friend and Post executive, Joyce Richardson, and quotes her saying:
“‘Just like the friendship of the characters Gloria, Robin, Savannah, and Bernadine, our get-togethers lifted us up when we were down, helped us network, gave us shoulders to lean on, advice when we needed it, and a safe place to share the good and bad times,” she said. “Each of us could connect with the issues that these women had in one way or another.'”
The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.
The book’s characters are trying to figure out their relationships with men, which impact family, faith, and career, but it brings them closer as a way to de-stress. Friendship between women over men troubles is a common theme in works, but Waiting to Exhale incorporates the Black female perspective, which in 1992 was rare in contemporary literature.
With the 2000s HBO series Sex and the City still in reruns based on a novel by Candace Bushnell, the stories don’t age with time. But with Black women as the stars during a time when 47% of Black adults are single in a dating-app world, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center, the new show could resonate on a higher level than it did 25 years ago.
How the new version of Waiting to Exhale will be perceived in the #MeToo era, where women are looking for female friendships but may not be bonding over men trouble, has yet to be seen.
Amid the #BlackStoriesMatter movement sparked by the George Floyd protests, Terry McMillan tweeted earlier this year that she wasn’t getting the same amount of interest for her 2020 novel, It’s Not All Downhill From Here.
Attica Locke released her latest book, Heaven, My Home, last year. She’s also worked on the Netflix miniseries When They See Us about the Black men formerly known as the Central Park Five. Her sister, Tembi Locke, is an actress and wrote a grief memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, about moving forward without her late husband. The memoir, a former Reese’s Book Club pick, is on track to become a film on Netflix with the aid of Hollywood bookwoman Reese Witherspoon.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air co-stars Karyn Parsons and Daphne Maxwell Reid spent Saturday talking about their literary ventures at the National Black Book Festival on Facebook Live.
Known for playing the iconic wealthy Black girl Hilary Banks on the hit ’90s NBC sitcom, Karyn has enjoyed a second career as a novelist and biographer managing a nonprofit geared toward bringing Black stories to life for kids. Daphne played the second rendition of Hilary’s mother, Vivian Banks, also known as Aunt Viv to star Will Smith’s character. She also mentioned her self-publishing experience.
Karyn, the founder and president of Sweet Blackberry Foundation focused on literary education, discussed her 2019 debut novel How High the Moon, a middle grade historical fiction novel set in the Jim Crow South.
“My mother grew up in Charleston, and she always talked about how happy her childhood was, how great everything was,” Karyn said during the panel. “Always a positive light. It took many years when it finally dawned on me the time that she grew up in and the location. So I started asking more questions.”
After pushing for more information, she said her mother grew up in a small town outside Charleston, South Carolina. The idea of the book came from her imagining if she grew up in the same location in the 1940s as a preteen Black girl. She added she was able to weave into the novel the true story of George Stinney Jr., a Black 14-year-old boy who was convicted and put to death in nearby Alcolu for allegedly murdering two White girls. He was exonerated in 2014, 70 years after his execution.
Along with the release of How High the Moon, Karyn also wrote a new children’s book titled Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight with illustrations by R. Gregory Christie. It will be released in December.
The publisher of both books is Little, Brown Young Readers under the Hachette Book Group.
“I was just writing all day now that I didn’t have a show,” Karyn said about her writing hobby blossoming post-Fresh Prince. “I guess I was always writing, but I never thought of myself as a writer because I always thought of myself as an actor.” She added that a friend she had met after her famous TV role had become a literary agent and convinced her to write a novel to complement her work with Sweet Blackberry.
Her passion to bring Bessie Coleman, the first African American female licensed aviator, started with a Kickstarter project for an animated short that debuted last year at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.
Daphne, who has self-published four photography books and a cookbook, said she’s working on her memoir.
“I’m still not a writer; I compile,” Daphne said. “What I started doing was taking photographs. I started this photographic journey, and from this journey, I was talking about the prints that I was making and what the relationship of the prints had to life. I was doing presentations before groups and talking a lot about the experience of taking the pictures. And finally I said, ‘I keep repeating the same thing over and over again,’ so let me write it down.”
Her photography books focus on doors from all over the world. “I was trying to encourage people to look at the details in their life. That was my main focus, so I wrote.”
Though she took the self-publishing route, Daphne said she may look for an agent for the memoir she’s working on.
The two actresses are not the only ones from the Fresh Prince world to become authors. Show producer and writer Maiya Williams, whose name also appears in the iconic green graffiti font in the intro, also became a middle grade author.
Karyn and Daphne can be seen on TV again with the Fresh Prince reunion airing Thanksgiving weekend on HBO Max.
Rachel True, the unforgettable star of teen witch cult classic The Craft and weed cult classic Half Baked, has released a tarot-reading guidebook accompanied with personal essays and tarot cards she helped design.
Appearing with another well-known hippie “mixed chick” actress Cree Summer, Rachel discussed her new book set True Heart Intuitive Tarot, Guidebook and Deck on Crowdcast with Los Angeles indie bookstore Book Soup. Approximately 450 attendees remained online throughout the hour-and-a-half webinar.
On her website, she describes the book and card set as “22 memoir essays from my Mixed Black Jewish chick’s mystic minded Hollywood life” that includes 22 major arcana cards. She said the set gives lessons to readers just learning about tarot or wanting to expand their knowledge of tarot.
A set of 78 cards, tarot involves the practice of reading tarot cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by asking questions then interpreting cards. Arcana is defined as “mysterious or specialized knowledge, language, or information accessible or possessed only by the initiate,” according to Merriam Webster. The major arcana cards in a tarot deck represents big themes and changes at play in your current, past and future life. The minor arcana cards represent the current day-to-day aspects that affect making decisions.
Wearing her signature turquoise butterfly necklace, Rachel described in the webinar how she became an occultist, in this case a tarot reader, as a child. She said between the ages of four and five, she would access her parents’ bookcase and pull out Beyond Good and Evil by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.
“When a few years later, when one of my parents’ friends gave me a deck, I was like, ‘Oh, I know these. Wait, er,'” she said. “It kind of connected with me and related back to those two books because some of them, especially Man and His Symbols, had some images in black and white and some images that are on the tarot cards. And that’s how I really began getting into tarot.”
Rachel and Cree, who admitted she really got into tarot practice only in the past two years, said that tarot doesn’t align with any religion, so it shouldn’t be seen as devilish. Even if you get The Devil card, which could mean sins such as greed may be overtaking one’s attention.
“Black people and ethnic people quite often went to the soothsayer or the card reader in the neighborhood because they didn’t go to doctors and we didn’t have shrinks, so this is a long tradition here,” Rachel said, calling the practice a “shrink in a box and spiritual Xanax.”
Released Tuesday, the book is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with illustrations by Stephanie Singleton. Rachel dedicated the book to Pamela Colman Smith, a key person in the early tarot movement when she illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck in 1909 for fellow British mystic and writer Arthur Edward Waite which became known as a standard. Rachel and Cree, who both identify as biracial calling their mothers dark-skinned Black women and their fathers White men, said Pamela’s story got buried in history as a biracial woman.
From 2002 to 2006, Rachel starred in the UPN sitcom Half & Half, which started streaming on Netflix on Thursday.
The deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd and the subsequent worldwide protests to combat racial injustice affected the celebrity book clubs with many delaying their monthly book selection announcements.
Most book clubs make the official announcement on social media the first week of the month, but some news on the latest picks came the second week of June and highlighted works by black women authors.
AMERIE’S BOOK CLUB
My Vanishing Country by Bakari Sellers
“In his unapologetically emotional memoir, CNN analyst @BakariSellers shares what it is to grow up “Black, country, and proud,” Amerie wrote in the book club’s Instagram announcement. “From the tragic event that helped to shape his life though it occurred before his birth, to his rise in politics while pursuing his education, to his dedication to not allowing those in his rural South Carolina community to be forgotten, to his personal experiences with anxiety, Bakari Sellers’ story left me amazed while also leaving me to wonder just how he managed to fit so much life into such a short time.”
BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB
GMA BOOK CLUB
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Actress Emma Roberts’ book club and Good Morning America‘s book club chose the same book again this month along with other major national book clubs. For May, both book clubs chose The Book of V. by Anna Solomon.
Belletrist shared that it delayed its announcement due to the civil unrest.
“We know we’re about a week later than usual, but we wanted to spend last week thinking about the ways in which we, as an online community, will be moving forward as we approach this seismic shift in our collective consciousness.”
“We have loved Brit’s book since we first got it a few months ago and are very excited to finally announce,” Belletrist stated in its message on Instagram. “Please stay tuned as we will have a more in depth conversation with Brit towards the end of the month, and look out for our weekly quotes, which are curated this month by this month’s author!”
“It’s a compelling read about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds: one black, and one white,” Good Morning America‘s book club wrote in its post. “It’s a powerful story about family, compassion, identity and roots.”
KAIA GERBER’S BOOK CLUB
Kaia Gerber shares book selections every week for her book club on Instagram, but she decided to give her friend Janaya Future Khan, international ambassador for Black Lives Matter, a platform on her account with over 5.6 million followers. She bookstagrammed a pile including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Danielle Allen’s Cuz: An American Tragedy, which follows the author’s journey in trying to rescue her younger cousin who dies after incarceration for a crime he commits as a teenager.
“in lieu of book club this week, i am honored that my friend and international ambassador of @blklivesmatter @janayathefuture will be going live on my page. they have been such a leader and powerful voice,” she wrote in her post. “they helped educate me on understanding the weight of privilege and the importance of these protests—and they have continuously and tirelessly worked to give people an understanding of what the mission of Black Lives Matter means for this country and for this world.”
NONAME’S BOOK CLUB
Blood in My Eye by George L. Jackson
Race Music: From Bebop to Hip-Hop by Guthrie Ramsey
Rapper Noname’s book club had selected one book last month, a change from its two-books-a-month template, but the book club returned to two books due to what’s going on in the world now.
“I felt it was important to go back to our old routine of picking two books a month,” Noname said on the book club’s Instagram profile. “In addition to reading Race Music I chose Blood In My Eye by George Jackson. Books about revolutionary action and resistance are vital during this time.”
Blood In My Eye was written by George Jackson, who died days after completing the book in 1971 at the hands of San Quentin State Prison guards during an alleged escape attempt. He was serving a sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station.
The homie pick, Race Music: From Bebop to Hip-Hop, is from the book club’s project manager Shakira in honor of June being Black Music Month.
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
Oprah is finishing up Hidden Valley Road, according to her book club’s schedule though it may have been pushed back with giving space online for the current civil unrest. The book club has posted about anti-racism books to read for kids and young adults.
READ WITH JENNA – TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
The debut novel surrounds an ambitious Muslim girl from the slums who is accused of executing a terrorist attack because of a careless Facebook comment.
“I think books are a tool for empathy,” Jenna said in her announcement. “And now when we are stuck at home—and I definitely won’t be traveling to India this summer—this is a tool for all of us to learn more about the plight of people all over the world.”
“I started writing from a place of alarm and anger,” Majumdar told Today in the article. “India has been changing in frightening ways and growing more intolerant of minority communities, more extremist. I definitely hope that readers will see resonances in the U.S. as well.”
REESE’S BOOK CLUB
I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
After the book club delayed its selection announcement, actress Reese Witherspoon directed her book club to make two selections—a first to recognize current events. Both books will be read over June and July.
“Elevating women’s stories is at the core of Reese’s Book Club. I love how this community champions the narrative for women and we are just getting started,” the book club placed in a graphic on Instagram. Unity and understanding through the lens of storytelling is how we will continue these meaningful conversations.”
Readers expressed their disappointment in the comments over the book club adding a book by a black woman author last minute and not pushing back the book by a white woman author to another month.
One of TV’s dream literary businesswomen is Poppy on ABC’s Single Parents. Played by actress Kimrie Lewis, Poppy owns the ultimate dream venture: a bookstore/wine bar.
We won’t see any new updates with Poppy’s business because ABC cancelled the adult-centric family comedy series last week. Now with the series’ two seasons living on Hulu, The Winebrary in the background can still be appreciated as the ideal place to peruse books and drink wine.
The Winebrary showcased bookshelves in a swanky setting with the bar being the focal point. The business model is starting to pick up steam in the real-life literary world. One example includes The 1894, the wine bar at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, which opened in February but has been temporarily closed like most bookstores due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Bookstores find it hard to break even with the competition of Amazon.com, so adding another non-book part, especially surrounding refreshments has been explored more in the past few years.
KIMRIE LEWIS, JAKE CHOI
KIMRIE LEWIS, BRAD GARRETT
Single Parents revolved around a group of five single parents played by Kimrie, Brad Garrett of Everybody Loves Raymond, Taran Killam of Saturday Night Live, Leighton Meester of book-to-TV classic Gossip Girl, and Jake Choi separately raising their children but depending on each other to create a village. With the children spewing appropriate lines clearly written for an adult audience and hanging out at The Winebrary bar at times, it stood out as an edgy, refreshing comedy even if you’re an adult who’s outgrown the family comedy model.
Having Poppy as a black woman owning a bookstore was also a unique creative decision. Los Angeles itself doesn’t have a black woman-owned bookstore though black women do own stores that sell books on top of other merchandise. Black women are the top book consumers, but owning indie bookstores period is too risky of a business for anyone with Amazon taking over the market share. The bookish bizwoman character even inspired Kimrie to share her book picks as #PoppysPick on her Instagram account. Though she hadn’t shared a selection in a while, Kimrie would pose with books worth reading.
Novi Brown, who currently stars in BET’s Wednesday night hit Tyler Perry’s Sistas, has joined the book club realm.
Naturally Lit Book Club, according to its Instagram profile, will select two books a month and focus on “breaking generational curses” and “discover new ways of thinking.”
Right now, the selections are at three books: What You Think of Me Is None of My Business by Terry Cole-Whittaker, The Hidden Messages in the Water by Masaru Emoto, and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-8DKNgBI8j/
The Afro-German actress plays Sabrina Hollins, a bank teller looking for love and supporting her three girlfriends in their search for love in Sistas, which premiered on BET and sister channel BET Her last October. The season finale airs Wednesday, April 29.
Emma Watson, the celeb bookwoman of Harry Potter film fame who made a recent appearance in the latest Little Women rendition, announced she will be stepping away from her public book club.
Last week, Our Shared Shelf put up a message on Goodreads from founder Emma, who said instead of having book club moderators she will return to recommending titles on social media.
“My wish is that this community continues to share and announce their own book recommendations with this hashtag keeping what we’ve built together alive and well for the future,” she wrote in the message. “I am excited to see it continue to grow and mature. I might just be reading along with you! Keep your eyes peeled as I announce other books later this year.”
Emma joins Florence Welch of alt rock pop group Florence + The Machine who announced a hiatus in July with her book club, Between Two Books. It also had the same format as Our Shared Shelf of selecting two books at a time.
Our Shared Shelf almost has 231,000 members on Goodreads.
The celebrity-helmed book clubs seem to be popular, but some celebrities have been honest about the hardships of managing a book club despite their star power and resources. Oprah just revived her book club in a new format with the backing of Apple. Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen admitted in 2018 they had chosen an initial book and interviewed the author the prior year but couldn’t follow through with the concept.
Amerie, best known for her 2000s R&B singles Why Don’t We Fall In Love? and 1 Thing, announced on YouTube she will be launching her new social media book club with making The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates this month’s inaugural pick.
Over the past few years, Amerie has been reinventing herself as a literary talent with her video book, beauty, and lifestyle blog. She contributed to the forthcoming black girl magic anthology, A Phoenix First Must Burn, that’s being called “Beyoncé’s Lemonade for a teen audience.” Her editing credits include another young adult anthology, Because You Love To Hate Me, and she has plans in the works to release a debut novel. She made a surprise return to music last year with the twin albums, 4AM Mulholland and After 4AM.
“For so long, I know you’ve been wanting the book club, and I’ve been reading the comments, but I didn’t know how I exactly want to do it and I believe I figured it out,” Amerie said in her announcement video.
She said her book club will “feature books by authors sent to us an array of different perspectives, voices, and I hope we can come together and learn from each other, listen to one another, also be heard, and embrace and celebrate our differences, and come away from the whole thing somewhat changed.”
Instagram and YouTube will be the main outlets for the book club conversation. The selections will be announced on the first Wednesday of the month with reminders throughout the month and final conversations at the end of the month.
Oprah’s Book Club famously chose The Water Dancer as its first pick in its Apple-backed reincarnation.