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My Little Brown Eye... BEA 2009 and Girls Write Now

As I mentioned in My Little Brown Eye... at 55 Secret Street, I've been getting out a lot lately.  Of course, that is not an excuse for not blogging here since last February, but I digress...

I went to a panel last week during Book Expo of America featuring Farai Chideya, Lori L. Tharps and Patricia Spears Jones hosted by Up South, Inc. and moderated by their editor Malaika Adero, founder and director of Up South and Vice President and Senior Editor at Atria Books. Each author read excerpts from their books and discussed their work.

My new friend George Alexander, author of Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk About the Magic of Cinema and co-author of Queens: Portraits of Black Women and their Fabulous Hair, sent an email to me about the panel and I'm glad he did.  I had the opportunity to not only meet the panelists but other several other writers like Felicia Pride, founder of Backlist, an organization that conducts creative workshops for all ages and author of 100 Life Lessons from Hip Hop's Greatest Songs and Heidi Durrow (who I "know" on Twitter) author of the forthcoming The Girl Who Fell From the Sky and co-host of Mixed Chicks Chat.

The bad news is that the panel was my only activity at BEA this year.  The good news is that it was very good and I scored copies of Lori's wonderful memoir, Kinky Gazpacho (check her blog, My American Meltingpot for details) and Farai's brand new novel Kiss the Sky, which is about a black rock musician who decides to make a comeback.

I also had a chance to attend Girls Write Now's recent Spring Soiree at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. Girls Write Now is a mentoring organization where professional women writers of all stripes - novelists, poets, journalists, etc. - mentor high school girls in creative writing.  The purpose of the soiree was to kick off the relaunch of the organization's advisory board.  Lauren Cerand, book publicist extraordinaire and Chair of the Board of Directors at GWN is in the top photo.  Novelists Maud Newton and Tayari Jones (she of slanket and turkey-carving fame) are in the bottom photo.  Tayari is in the orange dress and yes, it's by Cozbi.

ZZ Packer Book Party at Housing Works

On the night Barack Obama formally accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States of America (and just before I high-tailed it to B. Smith's to watch the speech) I went to the Housing Works Bookstore in Soho for a book party celebrating the release of a new anthology edited by ZZ Packer called New Stories From The South: The Year's Best 2008.  ZZ is the author of one of my favorite short story collections, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  It was a fun night and I got to see people already knew like "The Other Nichelle" - Nichelle Stephens and meet a lot of cool new people like ZZ herself and Maud Newton, who hosted the event which benefited KARES - Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support.  I also finally met an online pal in the flesh, critically-acclaimed author Tayari Jones.  That's Tayari and I with ZZ in the opening picture borrowed from Tayari's Flickr set.  Tayari is the author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling and she teaches at Rutger's University MFA program in Newark.

The signing was great, but of course food made it even better and we were all just falling over the bread pudding and the crawfish cheesecake from Mara's Homemade. Think crawfish, andouille sausage, cheese... absolutely amazing.  I saw Tayari with a plate and I said, "Girl, what is that???" You know it's serious if I have to start with "Girl..."

I would have never made it home in time to watch Obama's acceptance speech, so I'm glad that I remembered my friend's email about a watch party at B. Smith's.  It worked out well because you could hear a pin drop.  Almost as good as being home.