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My New Righting Group Book

Y’all, I’ve been so busy getting my new book into the hands of folks who can use it, I haven’t stopped long enough to tell you about it. Most of y’all know for 8 years I was part of a weekly writing group of Memphians who had personally experienced homelessness. We wrote; we held public readings; we hosted...

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There are NO DRAGONS in This Book

For story time at our house, the six-year-old grandson gets to pick out the books. He has a limit of three books per night. We have two shelves of books, but he has a cache of favorites he returns to time and again. I consider this an “in the wild customer satisfaction” survey. A consistent winner in this survey is There Are NO...

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Vonnegut

When I was in high school, I favored a small library located in a strip center. The library shelves began as soon as you walked in the door. From my weird spatial perspective, the library arranged the books backwards—the cataloguing began at the front desk, placing the fiction authors whose names were at the end of the alphabet closest to the...

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A Bomb Going Off

For many years, I thought I remembered a bomb going off. I was a child, no more than ten years old. My mother, my two sisters, and I were living in our redbrick duplex in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson. My cousins lived in the same neighborhood. All my friends lived in the neighborhood, and we spent forever wandering its streets,...

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The Joy of What If

I had two inspiration points for When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women. (Of course, I did–it always has to be complicated with me.) Both involved “What If.” This concept is when we set our imagination on “Go” and take off. At least it is for me. The joy of What If has inspired tons of novels, often in the...

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The American Daughters

I have fallen in love with…. I love stories that re-tell American history in a way that, had we not always written the past with a White male pen, we’d know was the way it might have happened. The American Daughters by Marcus Carlos Ruffin which retells how the years leading up to the Civil War unfolded in New Orleans is the latest novel I...

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