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Tag: george floyd
In summer 2020, author Kimberly Jones was known for her young adult novel, I’m Not Dying with You Tonight, co-authored with Gilly Segal. At a protest in Atlanta in the aftermath of George Floyd‘s murder, she broke down the racial inequities plaguing Black communities in a six-minute viral video that has now inspired a new book.
How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That’s Rigged, out this week, explores systemic racism and the economic disparities holding back Black Americans. Henry Holt and Co. is the publisher.
In the video that was viewed by millions across social media platforms, a quote about comparing the socioeconomic factors at play with the game of Monopoly resonated with viewers and contributed to the book’s title, she revealed in a CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King, Nate Burleson, and Tony Dokoupil.
So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?
Kimberly Jones
Though some viewers stereotyped her as an angry Black woman for how she delivered her speech on camera in 2020, Kimberly called it “righteous anger.”
“I think sometimes in righteous anger you get to express to people your pain, and I think that’s what people saw,” she said on the news show. “Even though they saw an angry woman, they saw a hurt woman, so they felt that and they were like, ‘Omigod, the pain is visible.'”
She also explained that viewers had reached out to her and said her delivery in the video enlivened the argument well enough to the point they forwarded it to their loved ones in hopes they better understand systemic racism.
“There’s no way to nurture empathy in people if they don’t know the full story,” she said. I think one of the greatest mistakes that we have made is we talk a lot about the miseducation of the Black child, but it’s really the miseducation of the American child that has allowed us to live in a way that we don’t have empathy for each other because it’s in that education, it’s in that knowledge that you can empathize.”
Kimberly teamed up with Gilly Segal a second time for the YA novel Why We Fly that came out last October from indie publisher Sourcebooks Fire.
*Spoilers ahead! Watch the series’ second season on HBO Max*
The Good Place star William Jackson Harper leads the HBO Max series Love Life as a Black editor in a White-dominated publishing world who evolves his approach to diversifying the field.
The first season of the series starred Anna Kendrick as an art dealer stumbling through relationships. In this new iteration, we meet Harper’s character Marcus Watkins, who is also stumbling through relationships with the show emphasizing race and culture in his romantic and career choices via pitch-perfect narration by Keith David.
Marcus Watkins in the beginning of the series is married to Emily, played by Maya Kazan, but he’s starting to feel she doesn’t understand him as a Black man in America since she’s White. He makes this realization after meeting Mia Hines, played by Jessica Williams, at Anna Kendrick’s character Darby’s wedding reception at a bar. Marcus and Mia hit it off, though he’s married and she’s in a relationship with who we soon learn is no other than basketballer Amar’e Stoudemire playing himself. Marcus’ emotional affair is discovered by Emily via iPad messages, and they get a divorce. Marcus blames Mia for the divorce, which of course starts a fight that separates them. They reunite after a few relationships, then another mishap happens in their budding love that forces them to separate.
In the end, they finally get together and stay together with a marriage and baby. As an editor, Marcus struggles to get Black voices heard through the book projects he picks up because his publisher, the fictional Sutton Court Publishing, and boss Josh, played by Steven Boyer, are not supportive of his vision. After Marcus quits his job, Mia convinces him to pursue his own novel. He becomes a full-time author and finishes his novel within two years. And they live happily ever after.
Uplifting Black authors
The first episode “Mia Hines” starts off with Marcus poking fun at his new client, a social media influencer who wants to add an insane amount of words in a subtitle of an instructional book. He wants to take on more serious projects, like an Afrofuturism manuscript he found from a Black grad student at Columbia University.
Josh asks about an update on the social media influencer’s book, and Marcus pipes up about the Afrofuturism book. Josh isn’t interested because the sales projections on that type of book is unpredictable while the social media influencer’s book will become an instant best-seller with her built-in audience.
We see Marcus fighting through the frustration of trying to push more works by authors of color. He decides to invite student-author Trae, played by Jordan Rock, into his office. With Marcus’ notes, Trae is not having it. After ridiculing Marcus’ posters of Black authors from Toni Morrison with cigarette in hand to James Baldwin with cigarette in hand, Trae calls Marcus a “safe, nonthreatening” Black editor voicing the opinions of a White editor. Marcus argues no publisher would take on the thousand-page manuscript. They agree to disagree.
It’s not until the season finale “Epilogue,” Marcus reunites with Trae to get feedback on his novel. Trae, who appears to have sold his book, tells him that Marcus’ Black character trying to maneuver through the White publishing world lacks personality. Marcus takes the note, and it motivates him to improve the book that eventually sells to a publisher. After not seeing eye to eye, they become beta reader brothers.
Celebrating a legend
Marcus visits his University of Michigan professor parents in episode “Destiny Mathis.” His distant father Kirby, played by John Earl Jelks, and mother Donna, played by Fresh Prince of Bel-Air “first Aunt Viv” Janet Hubert, seem to be disappointed that Marcus married Emily too soon out of college and now is divorced. Marcus feels like his happily married parents who are celebrating 35 years together don’t understand the complexities of his modern-day relationships.
In episode “Becca Evans,” Marcus is given an invitation to The Paris Review dinner from Josh as a consolation prize of sorts for receiving a promotion without a raise. The dinner honors poetry legend Nikki Giovanni. It’s the perfect way to lure his father to Manhattan from Ann Arbor for a night of bonding out on the town with their favorite poet.
The fact that the show writers and HBO managed to book the legend and have her on TV is amazing in itself. At 78 years old, Nikki Giovanni takes the stage as the living legend she is, reciting “Autumn Poems.”
the heat
you left with me
last night
still smolders
the wind catches
your scent
and refreshes
my sensesI am a leaf
Nikki Giovanni, “Autumn Poems”
falling from your tree
upon which I was
impaled
Taking a stand
The season finale “Epilogue” makes several time jumps, starting with New Years’ Day 2020 to March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold of society. As Marcus adjusts to working on his laptop from his couch, he realizes his live-in fling is not taking precautions seriously and breaks up with her. But as soon as he grows accustomed to his stay-at-home routine, the murder of George Floyd forces him to examine his role in society as a Black man.
Due to the pandemic, his job furloughs almost the entire staff, leaving Marcus the only employee of color. Via videoconferencing, Josh asks Marcus to review Sutton Court’s message on George Floyd and its commitment to diversity and inclusion. As much as Marcus had to fight to bring on authors of color that he still wasn’t able to bring on, the ask is too much. And Marcus demanded a proper promotion with a salary bump and didn’t get an answer. The missteps spark an expletive-laden explosion of how Sutton Court fails to have any commitment to diversity and inclusion whatsoever. Marcus quits on the spot by slamming his laptop screen down.
He soon reunites with Mia, who texts him out of the blue. They meet up masked up and commit to give their relationship another try. Then there’s marriage, a baby carriage, and the book Marcus always wanted to write.
The series packs in some Black Hollywood heavy-hitters like Blair Underwood and Kimberly Elise, both playing Mia Hines’ parents. Every episode is named after a person, mostly the woman Marcus is seeing, but under the romantic stumbling is a character of color also looking for his footing in the current publishing landscape.
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.
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.
Going into the third week of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, book Twitter went down another road in revealing the racial bias in publishing.
A Blade So Black and A Dream So Dark author L.L. McKinney started the #PublishingPaidMe Twitter hashtag on Saturday to invite White authors to share the advances they received on their books to give Black authors insight on what they received for theirs.
Writer’s Digest shares this definition of an advance versus a royalty:
An advance is a signing bonus that’s negotiated and paid to the author before the book is published. It’s paid against future royalty earnings, which means that for every dollar you receive in an advance, you must earn a dollar from book sales before you start receiving any additional royalty payments.
Though L.L. tweeted she made the hashtag to discover numbers from only White authors, Black authors and other authors of color decided to share their numbers.
One author is Dhonielle Clayton. Her debut fantasy young adult novel The Belles that published in 2018 is seen as inspiration in the multicultural fantasy YA genre. She shared she only received a $45,000 advance for her book though it was in one of the hottest genres at the time amid the publishing industry’s alleged push toward diversity and inclusion with adding more authors of color on their rosters and books featuring characters of color.
In a quote tweet from White YA novelist Laura Sebastian, Zoraida Córdova, who also writes fantasy YA, said she received $7,500 for Labyrinth Lost, which features Latinx characters inspired by her Ecuadorian roots. She added it’s her best-selling book yet. Laura, the author behind the Ash Princess series, tweeted she had received six-figure deals for each book in each of her three trilogies, the next two with debut novels set for 2021.
Laura later tweeted she received backlash for putting up such high numbers and was accused of distributing “sexual favors.” Battling the sexism online, she added she wanted to be an ally and share her reality.
Myriam Gurba, the queer Chicana memoirist behind Mean and the main campaigner to spread awareness on Jeanine Cummins’ White narrative version of the Mexican immigration story in the best-seller American Dirt, said she just earned $3,000 for Mean.
Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor who specializes in literature highlighting Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism said she wouldn’t share her numbers but offered the alternative of not taking advances and just receiving royalties. From her tweet, she implies that royalties put more money in her hands in the long run, especially for her award-winning novella trilogy Binti.
The #PublishingPaidMe hashtag is an eye-opening account of how authors who are not White and cisgender may be lowballed for their work, the work readers pay for and check out from libraries, actions that produce a lot of money for publishers.
This conversation may trigger a long-term movement in the publishing industry, where publishers have the opportunity to divide budgets more equally instead of basing sale projections on the myth that diverse stories don’t sell well. Even with the success of books such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, that myth still lingers, especially when these Black authors and very few others made news with their advances.
Jesmyn Ward, who won the National Book Award twice, tweeted Monday that her publisher did not want to give her $100,000 for her next book after Salvage the Bones received the award.
Mary Karr, Robinne Lee, and Lilliam Rivera were a few of the authors to respond to Jesmyn’s claims. In a series of tweets, Jesmyn clarifies how her other works fared like Men We Reaped and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which was her first book to earn a $100,000 advance.
L.L. added in multiple tweets that there will be continuation in the discussion where Black authors will be asked to share information.
A young adult author’s video interview discussing how race, socioeconomic status, and history are the root of the latest civil unrest has gone viral.
Kimberly Jones, the co-author of the young adult novel I’m Not Dying With You Tonight along with Gilly Segal, passionately spelled out why people are protesting, rioting, or looting after the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. His death has sparked nationwide civil unrest as the U.S. slowly comes out of the COVID-19 quarantine.
In a George Floyd tribute T-shirt, Kimberly says she supports both viewpoints from Black people saying they don’t want rioting or looting in our communities and they don’t want to support mainstream White-centric businesses. She then breaks down the difference between protestors, rioters, and looters—a definition that the media struggles with in its reporting, which leads to people misunderstanding the situation such as in the example with the Red Sofa Literary Agency founder who called police on people she classified as looters last month.
“Let’s ask ourselves why in this country in 2020 the financial gap between poor Blacks and the rest of the world is at such a distance that people feel like their only hope and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it,” Kimberly says in the video.
“But they are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bed, getting that phone, whatever it is they’re going to get because in that moment when riots happen and they present an opportunity of looting that’s their only opportunity to get it. We need to be questioning that. Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food-insecure, that clothing-insecure?”
What also helped the video go viral is her Monopoly comparison to how economics work in America.
“If I right now decided to play Monopoly with you and for four hundred rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money,” she says, pointing to the four centuries that Black people have been in the U.S. dealing with injustice after injustice. “I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. I didn’t allow for you to have anything. And then we play another fifty rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you.
“That was Tulsa, that was Rosewood. Those were places we built Black economic wealth, and we were self-sufficient. We owned our stores. When we owned our property. And they burned them to the ground.”
She refers to the race massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida in 1923 in which White mobs destroyed thriving Black communities. Descendants of people who were impacted by those massacres are calling for reparations.
In a tweet, Kimberly wrote, “I just took the time to go through the first hundred or so responses in this thread and I am FLOORED! The support is so welcome and overwhelming.”
https://twitter.com/kimlatricejones/status/1269275215663685635
Titled “How Can We Win,” the video interview is on YouTube via David Jones Media and has a timestamp of being posted on June 1 and the interview conducted on May 31. David Jones wrote in the video’s summary:
“On day two, Sunday the 31st, he activated his dear friend author Kimberly Jones to tag along and conduct interviews. During a moment of downtime he captured these powerful words from her and felt the world couldn’t wait for the full length documentary, they needed to hear them now.”
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Matthew A. Cherry, who recently received the golden Oscar statue for his six-minute film and accompanying book Hair Love illustrated by Vashti Harrison, shared the video on June 5.
Authors like Angie Thomas and Jason Reynolds were quick to point out that Kimberly is a Black author who deserves the support with the purchase of her book. Harper Collins Publishers’ Epic Reads even chimed in.
According to the book’s description, “I’m Not Dying with You Tonight follows two teen girls―one Black, one White―who have to confront their own assumptions about racial inequality as they rely on each other to get through the violent race riot that has set their city on fire with civil unrest.”
The video is approaching half a million views on YouTube.
As the death of an unarmed Black man killed at the hands of police in Minneapolis sparks protests, a local literary agency owner is being criticized for notifying police about so-called “looters.”
Literary agents who worked at Red Sofa Literary Agency, located in the Minneapolis twin city St. Paul, have been announcing their resignations on Twitter and letting aspiring authors know their queries may go unanswered due to owner Dawn Frederick’s actions. It’s in response to the uprisings in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities over the death of George Floyd, who was killed after a police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes on May 25 to place him in custody for alleged forgery.
On May 28, Dawn said during protests she called the police to alert officers to what she viewed as looting and property damage.
The people who did this had busted the doors and many people were running out with items in their arms, jumping back into their cars, and hightailing it off the block. It was straight up looters.
Please note: there were NO protestors present. Zero protestors.
She continues in her statement on the agency’s website that she’s participated in protests in support of Black, Indigenous and People of Color. She also added she’s “incredibly saddened” by George Floyd’s death, especially since it happened in her city.
Having seen people get arrested when protesting, I’d never under any circumstances call the police on someone for protesting. That goes against everything I do when it comes to honoring (and participating) in protests.
But her fellow literary agents disagreed as they were still resigning as of Saturday afternoon, the height of protests across the U.S. marching in solidarity over police brutality. Kelly Van Sant, Amanda Rutter, and Stacey Graham shared their resignation letters on Twitter. According to the list of agents on the website, Dawn and Liz Rahn, who hasn’t tweeted in weeks, may be the only ones left.
Abby Jimenez and Barb Curtis are two authors who expressed they’ll be leaving the literary agency along with their agents. Some aspiring authors announced rescinding their queries to and contracts with the agency. Beth Phelan, the creator of the #DVpit Twitter pitch party for aspiring marginalized authors, shared the story to her 23,800 followers that may have helped it go viral on book Twitter.
She and other supporters quote-tweeted the agents who resigned and asked their followers to assist them in finding another job.
Dawn has owned Red Sofa Literary since 2008, according to the agency website. Her experience shows her dedication to the local literary community with being a co-founder of the MN Publishing Tweet Up and a member and teaching artist of the BOD for Loft Literary. Book editor Jake Klisivitch stood in solidarity with Dawn but received backlash on social media for his support.
Her Twitter account @redsofaliterary doesn’t exist anymore after sharing her reasons for calling authorities amid the protests; the agency can be found on @TeamRedSofa.