Book trailer: Kimberla Lawson Roby

Here's the trailer for Kimberla Lawson Roby's new title, Sin No More.




She'll be in Savannah this weekend for the Savannah Book Festival - a first event for the city. See all of her tour dates here.

Other African American authors appearing at the festival include:

Tina McElroy Ansa
Cora Daniels
Michael A. Fletcher
Dr. Robert Franklin (Pres. of Morehouse College)
Kevin Merida

A couple of events and two promotion resources

Nathan McCall in Charlotte From an e-mail forwarded to me.
Hello to All,

Nathan McCall, the NY Times best selling author of "Makes Me Wanna Holler", will be in Charlotte Saturday to support The Brown Angel Center, which helps formerly incarcerated women become financially independent. McCall, who was formerly incarcerated, will be at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church talking about his life and his debut novel, "Them." A book signing will follow. The event starts at 1 pm and admission is $7. Books will be on sale. The church is at 3400 Beatties Ford Road. Please share this information!
I am sure you will find his story very motivating.

Thank you for your support.

Patrice Gaines
The brown Angel Center

And from another forwarded e-mail (both from Tina McElroy Ansa):
You are invited to hear:

Dr. Henry Louis Gates
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois

Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University
Sunday, February 3, 2008
3:00 p.m.

St. John Baptist Church
522 Hartridge St.
Savannah, GA 31401
Free and Open to the Public
Followed by Catered reception with the speaker

For More Information:
912-234-8000
www.kingtisdell.org
www.savannnahblackheritagefestival.com
(Please forward to your contacts)


A former publishing executive has launched a web-based broadcast with and about authors. Read the NYTimes story here. See the broadcast here [actually, you can't see it yet - just sign up for notification]. It's called Titlepage TV and the tagline is "Passionate Conversations About Books."

A social networking and promotion site for authors - Red Room - got a lot of attention this week because of the site's involvement in a special blog effort to promote Patry Francis' book, The Liar's Diary. Francis is having a health crisis and won't be able to promote her book in the traditional way - so more than 300 bloggers did it for her today by writing about her and the book. If you visit Red Room and visit the blog section, you'll see many posts about her.

Shows what writers can do when they come together - what if authors did that every day of the year - gather to focus on one another's books?

Catching up - Karibu and The Root

Many of you have already heard about the news that Karibu books in the Baltimore-D.C. area is closing. If you haven't, here's the link to the store site, with a letter about the closing:
http://www.karibubooks.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

And here are the articles:
Baltimore Sun: Readers say goodbye to a friend
Washington Post: Karibu Bookstores to Close Doors in DC Area
Publishers Weekly: Karibu Books to Close

With all the Black bookstore closings and the troubling news about the economy, it seems like a good time for someone to pull together a proposal to do a history of the contemporary Black bookstores in this country. And talk about what they brought/bring to the community and why they succeed or falter.

The Root
Henry Louis Gates and The Washington Post launched a new online magazine called The Root today. I didn't have much time to spend on the site, but I did like Kim McLarin's essay about Michelle Obama. She writes that it is Mrs. Obama who makes her (McLarin) really like the Senator - since he chose a sister who is one of us. One of those brown-skinned girls, "reglar" but not ordinary.

A new favorite thing

Booktour.com
I've become a fan of booktour.com, both as a tool for author publicity and as a cool way for readers to hear about authors on tour in their area. My new favorite thing on the site is "following" authors that I'm interested in - and the possibilities for fans, colleagues and organizations to leverage booktour.com for content on their sites.

Here's one of the things that caught my eye:



Putting an author's tour schedule on your site. This is great for small presses and authors who don't have the time or resources to update their information in multiple places - or who want an easy way to pass this on for use on affiliate, fan and other sites.

So if you haven't checked out booktour - go over now. It's easy, free, and puts authors names in front of readers - very likely new readers to many writers.

Awards - and completion theory

The American Library Association - Association for Library Service for Children announced its literary awards this week, including the Caldecott and Newberry medals. See the winners here.
What I love about reading the awards announcements are finding out about authors and books that I haven't seen before - or being nudged toward those works that have been in my sight for awhile but not quite urgent reads yet. Here are some children's authors or illustrators of African descent who are new to me this week:
Sundee Frazier
Ashley Bryan
Magarita Engle, The Poet Slave of Cuba
Christopher Paul Curtis, Elijah of Buxton

Great to see more than one title with boys of African descent - I will probably get multiple copies of those.

About completion ...
Years ago, around a kitchen table, I had a good laugh with two friends over one of us having completion disorder - starting, but not finishing things. Let's just say that I should not have laughed, as I'm in the same boat now. I'm not much of a finisher - I start things really well and love it, but have trouble getting to the finish line.

So I was really glad to see Marilynn Griffith's post today about completion and her 8-minute to your novel talk. Here's a link to the notes from that talk - just reading this today helped me feel like things are possible and I don't always have to be surrounded by incomplete dreams. Wonderful for writers who are surrounded by lots of obligations. I hope I'll have a chance to hear her do the workshop in person - hint, hint Mrs. G.

Mad at Gloria

It always comes to this, at some point in our American conversation.

Gender v. race. Choose your sides.

Gloria Steinem had an Op-Ed in today's NYTimes entitled, "Women Are Never Front-runners."

In it she makes her case that women are never in the lead and that

"Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House."

She also says this:

"That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot,"

I find this unbelievable - that Gloria Steinem can put out such a half-baked version of how race and gender work in this country. The above is a technically true statement, but glosses over the reality of Black men, and later, Black women and the vote in the U.S. In many places Black men had the right to vote in name only - and faced many obstacles before ever reaching the polls - including the threat and reality of violence.

How dare she count that as a privilege.

I have so many encounters that remind me of this useless call to see whose privilege, whose struggle, trumps. In the company of so-called progressives, I am continually amazed by the blindspots in individuals knowledge of American history and their interpretation of how gender and race operate here.

I know that there will be lots of commentary about this Op-Ed - and were I to have the choice, I would love to see Pearl Cleage or Michael Eric Dyson write back on this. (And had Mad at Miles pulled off my own bookshelf and handed to me tonight during my rant on this - that's like fanning the flames, for sure - in the best way possible).

I think I'm calm enough to go to sleep - and I did mention one book!

A round of links

Playing on the PC tonight - thus I can do links! Woo hoo.

Quickly, though :).

I didn't even know there was a NC Literary Festival. Apparently it is a challenge to put it on each year. The 2008 festival isn't happening, but UNC - Chapel Hill is stepping up to the plate to make it happen in 2009.

How are all those other festivals surviving if universities can't keep festivals alive? And is moving it around every two years worth it, if the institutions struggle to keep it going?


New term to me: shopdropping
I read this in the NYTimes, after it was linked to by MJ Rose. So it's likely an old term and I'm just showing my square-ness by using it late in the game. Same as it ever was.

In case you don't know shopdropping is putting things (either re-placing them or bringing them from outside) where they don't belong in retail establishments to make a point or build buzz.

I feel a bit of tension around that idea - I like it, but I know I'd be teed off if I picked up a shopdropped item that didn't make me happy, like something from the right side of the political spectrum.

Any authors who've shopdropped out there? Let us know how that worked out for you ...

Transitioning hardware

I am trying mightily to begin using a Mac as my only personal computer at home. But I keep running into frustrating (for me) wrinkles - like not seeing a hyperlink button in the blogger window. So I am posting individual notes rather than one long item here.

What is most frustrating for me is that I don't feel I have any time for the things I imagine I like to do - like this blog, writing and just playing on the computer. So a little glitch - when I need to be done in 15 minutes, can ruin the idea altogether.

Today (and on previous occasions, too) I read that what really makes distinguishes successful people is that they do not see failure as an end point. I am trying to work through that issue - as I struggle with failure - it is an endpoint for me and I have left most of my dreams behind because of first failures.

Can you tell it's the first day of the new year, yet? I am, like many, ruminating on what's lost, what's ahead and what I need to fix within myself. Aargh. (yes - I jump from missing buttons on screen to self-evaluation and melancholy).

It would be so lovely for the screen to look just they way it does on the PC - with the hyperlink button.

Alice Walker's papers ...

Are now at Emory University in Atlanta (my alma mater!). I can't wait to see them - they should be available for viewing sometime next year.
Tayari Jones posted about this - and had some comments on the notion of where papers land.
Here's an AJC article about Emory and Alice Walker.

Check out my Slide Show!

Word of the day

The word of the day over at Merriam-Webster is auctorial, of or relating to an author. Seeing that made me a bit nostalgic for grad school so I could find a way to work that word in. But simple rules out here in the real world.

Good news for Due fans

I wandered over to Tananarive Due's blog this week to see if she had any new posts. And I was rewarded with the news that the third novel about Dawit and Jessica will be out early in 2008. I'm a big fan of her work and it is on my list of must-haves. If it were available now, I'd be dropping big hints about it for Christmas.

The novel, Blood Colony, won't be out until June 2008. So it will be awhile before you can get your hands on it - still that's more than enough time to re-read her early novels in this story.

Book reviewers, ethics and a new detective

The National Book Critics Circle has posted the results from their latest survey of book reviewers about ethics. There's a summary of some of the results on the blog and you can link to the results with comments from 2007 and 1987.

Trying to muddle through the conflict questions was a little tricky for me. Not because I'm an ethically loose kind of person. It's more likely because I've only had about 5 hours sleep and, in this new socially networked, multiple stream of income world, I wonder how hard it is as reviewer and a book editor to identify and shut out those conflicts.

If an editor cannot review books by any of their freelance reviewers, that's strange to me. Sure there are thousands of books being published, so content is not the issue, but coverage (if any of them has a noteworthy, popular or very unique book) is.

And as the actual job of book reviewer disappears and all reviewers are freelancers or writers who do other things as well, how can that last?

Interesting reading and thinking.

New P.I. on the block
Walter Mosley will introduce a new detective, Leonid McGill, in 2009. Mosley has left Little, Brown and is now with Riverhead Books. He has a three-book deal there - two will be entries in the detective series and one is a literary novel.

Easy Rawlins was my first adult love in the mystery genre - I still remember reading the early novels and not being able to get enough of Easy. I will be eager to get into the other series. (BTW, my elementary mystery fix was good old Encyclopedia Brown - who doesn't love a mystery solving nerd).

A Good Blog is Hard to Diversify?

Karin Gillespie, the editor (or site manager?) of A Good Blog is Hard to Find - the currently all-white Southern writers blog, I posted about - left a comment. Here's what here response was to my rant about there being no people of color in the ranks over there:

Hi there,

I'm the Southern site person. I did invite several African American authors. Never heard a word back. I had the same problem with men. There's way more women than men. Anyway, I'm working on the diversity thing. Just didn't want you to think it was deliberate.

Karin Gillespie

She posted it in comments, but I thought it worth sharing in the regular content here. So there you have it - she's working on it. I hope somebody takes her up on the offer - and that she has a good list of folks to query.

For now, the blog is still in my bookmarks and I'll keep checking back.

Thanks for the response, Karin.

Other notes to share
I found, on the Crime Sistahs' blog, a post by Persia Walker (web site | blog). I wasn't familiar with her work and am glad to have seen her post and gone to her web site. She writes mysteries set in Harlem in the 1920s.

Mysteries are my current (as in last five years or so) obsession and I'm always sad when I find an author I like who has only 2 - 3 titles, because I end up hunting for someone new to read. So Persia Walker's on my list - right after I finish the two Nichelle Tramble books I bought (finally!) this weekend.

I am currently reading the The Dying Ground and were it not for having to help people play, eat and get to bed, I'd be finished with it already. It's really the kind of book I want when I have a day (ha!) alone in my pajamas. And it made me come up with an idea - a book lock - that I really like and is completely bizarre, unmarketable and useless to 99.98% of the world.

The Book Lock - Are you ever frustrated by a spouse/partner/child/sibling/parent who picks up that wonderful novel you've been reading and then can't put it down? Stop rolling your eyes at them and get a book lock with your own combination. With the book lock you'll be able to finish a book without delays and annoying references to the ending.

Yes, this is a product I would consider buying. I'm that possessive of new books. Read it after I'm done!

A rant - and a little naivete

I read about a new blog a few weeks ago. A group blog by Southern writers. Sounded like just my kind of reading - as I am a Southerner, a writer, a reader and a lover of stories of all kinds, including the sometimes wonderful, terrible, fascinating tales of the South.

I am so naive.

Here is the site - A Good Blog is Hard to Find.

As I said before, I'm from the South. I know quite a bit about the South and the history of the American South and its culture. So this should be no surprise to me, but it was.

The surprise? As far as I can tell, and I clicked through to all of the author pages, all of these contributors are white. ANd it is 2007 and that is unbelievable. Forget being a Southern writers blog, an American writers blog with that many contributors ought to have some contributors who are non-white. Unless of course the originators of the blog completely ignore large portions of the writing, reading and published population.

I've been stewing about this for a few weeks and just did not want to make it a post, but it keeps making me feel like smoke is coming out of my ears. I would have hoped that contemporary, living Southern authors would not have a circle that is so limited that the only other authors they think of are white.

But perhaps they reached out and not African American authors responded or were interested in participating? Hmmmm. On another day, when I am feeling more confrontational, I will e-mail whoever is the master of the site and pose this. When the smoke clears.

Now, onward and upward.

All I want for Christmas - books and two days of quiet

I doubt seriously that I'll get both those items, but I can always dream. In lieu of having all my dreams come true, I'll hunting for some good reads for this month.

One book I'm getting closer to buying is Nathan McCall's Them, reviewed in the LATimes by Paula L. Woods (whose mysteries I love, btw). He's appearing at the Margaret Mitchell House (which makes me laugh for multiple reasons) in Atlanta on Dec. 6 and at Medu Bookstore in Greenbriar Mall on Dec. 8. Tina McElroy Ansa will also be at the Medu event with a bunch of other authors - make a day of it.

And, as my mother says, I'm switching subjects now ...

I love it that Nichelle Tramble is a writer on Women's Murder Club. I only watched it because of her talking about it on her blog and I really love the show. I am a police procedural junkie anyway, so it was kind of an easy sell. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't have her novels yet. (Okay - so that's my to do for today, order them!)

She's also been posting about the WGA strike. Here's a news story about black writers who are participating in the strike. I hope it's resolved soon, since I think they're right, I don't like reality shows, and I really count on my taped shows for diversion.

Sunday morning surf

I'm not much of a romantic and I don't cry at weddings. But this story in the NYTimes today nearly made me cry.

Nooses - to ignore or not?
Two pieces this week question whether or not we should pay any attention to things like nooses that are used to spark a rise in us.

In today's Washington Post Robin Givhan, in writing about Kara Walker's retrospective at the Whitney, writes about how much power we give these symbols. And how we should no longer give that power to the symbol and to the people who use it against us.

And earlier this week I listened to John McWhorter's commentary on NPR and he said very similar things about not giving over power to the symbol.

I generally argue against that kind of thinking which essentially urges us to let racist symbols be. I don't want to ignore those symbols - and certainly if I ever see a noose anywhere near me or my family, I certainly will raise a stink. But is that the right thing? It, as McWhorter and Givhan argue, doesn't work and doesn't matter. We hold vigils and "raise saying" and still the symbols are waved in our faces. So what does it matter? Does a noose, raised by an ignorant white person (or any other race), erase or diminish any of our opportunities? Or accomplishments?

It's a part of the discussion we haven't had yet, I think, among all the Jena 6 protests.

And it's interesting that we can come up with this much support and energy around this one case, when so much else that we can impact is going on.

It's really not all-Terry all the time, is it?

Well, I've been watching the Terry McMillan / Jonathan Plummer spectacle - like so many. I'm amazed at how much press this is getting and how this twisted personal drama is now the thing making us talk about ghetto/urban literature. I suppose as long as we have the discussion it matters, but it seems so weird to hear stories about it that start with the divorce drama. I feel like I'm gossiping every time I read something about this.

I have to admit to being in the dark about who Karen Hunter is, though. But now I certainly know who she is and I'm surprised at the number of books she's had and has coming out. The Black men love white women book is one that I'll be curious to see if it has any legs once she stops getting the attention drawn to her by Terry. What a bizarre book to even write in 2007. And the Ray J book - there are just so many "ew" factors with that that I am amazed she can talk about that book in meetings. 1,000 women and he's in his mid-twenties? Who would even believe that? And even if it were true, I think it's crazy and I wouldn't even what that in my head.

Oh well. Here are some of the links in case you don't have enough Terry, Jonathan and ghetto lit in your life:

NPR: Publishing Company Called Out Over Ghetto Lit
The Advocate: Bookstore Refuses to Carry Plummers Tell-All Novel

A few things to read and hear:

About Edwidge Danticat and her new book, Brother I Am Dying -

Review in the Washington Post by Bliss Broyard
Interview on Fresh Air

Amy Alexander reviews Margaret Cezair-Thompson's The Pirate's Daughter - WashPost

And I didn't know that Target sponsored Children's Book Festivals. If you're a children's author, this sounds like a good thing.

Decatur Book Festival - not live blogging, but here

I'm at the AJC Decatur Book Festival this weekend and it's been fun. I'm actually here working as a publicist, but did get to visit quite a few vendor booths and just walk around and get a feel for the events.

Today I went to Hank Klibanoff's presentation about his book, The Race Beat, on the press and the coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. I have always been very interested in movement history and my undergraduate years stoked that interest. One of my professors, Claude Sitton, is one of the most prolific white reporters from that time and Hank mentioned him today. So that was cool to hear.

I'm excited to read Hank's book. It's been awhile since I've done serious reading about the movement.

Yesterday I went to Tina McElroy Ansa's reading - she's the reason I'm at the festival, actually - and that was great fun. Lots of laughter and excitement for her new work, Taking After Mudear.

I haven't been to downtown Decatur in a long time. It is such a cute downtown and filled with shops - shops that I would actually spend money in. So cute that I want to move here. It's also perfect for the festival - no shortage of sweet restaurants to sit in and talk about books.

Some other authors I'm interested in are here, including L.A. Banks, but I haven't made it to their events. I was really low-key on my festival planning and decided to just chill a bit this weekend. Other folks that I've seen here are Dr. Beverly Tatum from Spelman College and Valerie Boyd, author Wrapped in Rainbows.

I've enjoyed browsing at all the book tents, though I am always, perhaps too much so, analyzing whose books are placed or not placed and how the staff at the tents are selling books. At one tent, for a publisher, I don't remember being greeted, which is especially odd because it's such a small space. But I browsed anyway, as it was really a press with a lot of authors or titles that seemed to speak to me. Then I heard the staff member telling someone else that they did have a lot of Caribbean, African American and African titles, authors and/or subjects in their list and that was a focus for them.

On the one hand, I'm glad he didn't assume that, because I'm Black that I would just have to know that. But on the other hand (a more than slightly cynical hand) I wondered why he didn't share that with me. Did I just not look like a book buyers?

So I didn't buy anything there, though I was definitely looking at two titles and trying to decide between them.

Oh well, I bought books elsewhere and am moving on.

I'd love to hear reports from other book festivals - from authors or readers - send yours if you'd like to see it posted.

Original music, Sapphire and more

Just read an interesting post at M.J. Rose's blog about original music being the next big thing for book promotion. Not exactly new, but perhaps it will be hotter now. I seem to remember that there was original music, or maybe a compilation "soundtrack" for one of E. Lynn Harris' novels. And I think Erica Simone Turnipseed had some music hookup for A Love Noire. Oh well, as fast as the promotional trend globe is turning, everything two years old is new again.

In an interview with Mo'nique, the comedian talking about being cast in the film version of Sapphire's Push. The novel is about a young Black girl who's been sexually and physically abused - that's not the whole story, so go read it if you haven't. It's one of the best serious books I've read and one of the hardest to take in. I've read it twice and didn't think I could read it again, but I do want to see the movie. It's amazing that Sapphire could write this particular story, make it nearly impossible not to read and finish and yet it is such a terrible tale in some ways.

[Warning - I'm totally in a change the subject without warning mood.]

The latest Easy Rawlins mystery, Blonde Faith, will be out in October. And I have a galley copy. I'm going to find a place to review it, I hope, but am very excited that Easy is back.