My Favorite Author, Tayari Jones, Comes to Town :)

This weekend, I had a rare chance to see two of my favorite writers, Tayari Jones and Pearl Cleage. They had a conversation, Q&A event, and book signing as part of the Sisterspeak and More program at Spelman College this February.

What an event! I took quite a few pictures… Note: I am a member of the BADDEST book club in the ATL, Circle of Friends II… Below are a couple of pictures of both authors with my infamous and fabulous book club president, Shunda Leigh…


Now I love Pearl Cleage… She is a professor at Spelman.. But she wears many hats: playwright, essayist, novelist, feminist… She was commissioned by Oprah Winfrey to pen a poem, "We Speak Your Names", for the Legend’s ball last year… She is a wonderful writer, and she is one of the few writers whose books I will buy in hardcover, the first week they hit the bookstores…

She has a new book coming out on February 28th, Baby Brother's Blues, and I plan to buy it AND read it by the end of next week… Shunda had an advance copy... It took everything in me not to SNATCH IT when she sat it down for a moment!


But many of you may not have heard of my favorite author Tayari Jones… She is a Spelman College graduate and a English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana. I hadn’t heard of her either until I read the short story “Press and Curl” in the African American Short Story Anthology Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing. “Press and Curl” is a short story about a young girl getting her hair straightened, in preparation for a funeral….



Now all the sistas out there…

you KNOW you remember getting your hair straightened…
…the smoke coming off that HOT ass straightening comb (which, by the way, was heated up in a hot metal chamber--scratch that, my Mama was bootleg-- she heated the hot comb up on one of the eyes on the stove) , the pressing oil, the hair grease (we used the green Afro Sheen... Ultra Sheen Cosmetics), all the sounds of that hot comb sliding slowly through your hair, sizzle, sizzle, etc… I even have a hot comb burn on my shoulder to this very day!

Don’t act like you don’t know!! Ya’ll remember that ish!!

And if you don’t know already from reading my blog…

~***I LOVE ALL THINGS NOSTALGIC!***~

Really though…

And sitting down in the kitchen getting your nappy be-be shot hair straightened is about as NOSTALGIC as it gets…

There was an ART to that thing! You were something special if you could straighten a girl's hair without damn near burning off a ear or scorching a neck or forehead...

Um, yeah... "Press and Curl" brought back some serious memories for me! I mean, have you seen anyone even THINK to write about that subject? Something that just about every little black girl experienced as a child??

After I read that story (three times), I wondered, “Who in the hell is Tayari Jones and what ELSE has she written that I can get my hands on RIGHT NOW!!?”

So I looked her name up on Amazon.com, and saw that she had written a novel…

I went to the bookstore and bought it that very day…

I read that novel, her first novel, the highly acclaimed Leaving Atlanta in two days. Leaving Atlanta is a historical fiction story that has the Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children cases of the late seventies/early eighties as a backdrop… It is a fictional novel about 3 children that were growing up during that time. It was the first piece of historical fiction that I’d ever read… Heck, I didn’t know what historical fiction was until I read this book.

It made me cry.

I was a sixth grader in the ATL during the time of the Atlanta Child Murders Era, and she captured the way my friends and I felt during that time perfectly… all the angst, all the fear, the uncertainty… I remember the worse thing you could say to someone back then was “That’s why ‘the Man’ is gonna get you!!” Saying that was MUCH worse than cussing somebody out… She captured that perfectly and then some…

Her second novel, The Untelling, is about a young woman living in the ATL who has to “untell” a lie, and at the same time, come to grips with things that have happened in her past family life… (This is NOT a good synopsis of the novel. This novel was so deep, deep off the doggone pages, with so many layers, and I can’t summarize it in one sentence. Hell, this post would be 10 pages long if I tried to summarize it.) The Untelling touched me just as much as Leaving Atlanta did…

The Untelling was awesome, yet spooky… Some of the hoods I have lived in were richly detailed in that book. (I grew up in SWATS, MLK corridor, Ben Hill, and Adamsville before moving to College Park). All of the things I go through currently with the crackheads in my ‘hood are detailed in that book… I almost wondered if Tayari Jones did some undercover work in my hood… I asked a question during the Q&A session about her research in the area of gentrification, because it was so real… she mentioned that she had been interested in such real estate issues…

(Come on Tayari, you can tell me… you spent a little time in the hood as an undercover crackhead! The sequences you had in the book were a little too, um... REALISTIC!!)

(And look at your braids, Tayari... They are FIERCE! You are a true ATLien...I bet the same girl that braids all the ATLien rappers hair braids yours...)

LOL!

These were the first books that I’d ever read where the city of Atlanta was not only a backdrop for a story, but was actually a living and breathing character in the story…

Dang, I wish I could write like that!!!...

**Ladylee setting fire to the Ph.D. dissertation and several scientific publications and ferociously spiking them out of the Mazda into the middle of Peachtree street traffic**

LOL!

Now this sister is the main reason I want to write… I might even take a class...I had NEVER read books like hers before. I’d never read LITERARY books (note: LITERARY, not that urban drama commercial fluff B.S.) about my city, about things so similar to what I’d gone through growing up in the ATL… books with SO many layers… so much symbolism, great use of metaphor, simile, description…books that I am thinking about for days after I read them.

I will always follow her career… She’s already winning book prizes…I see a Pulitzer on the horizons…

Oh yeah, Tayari, you’re friendly now…

She put out an APB for me (Where is Ladylee?) on her blog a couple of weeks ago because I was missing in action… I couldn't figure out the new comment procedures. (Simple things like that leave me stupefied). It took several emails to prod me to figure out what the heck to do....(Now THAT was hilarious... scary but hilarious!)

And posing your books so that you could casually show off your shoes... That was quite original and oh so wonderfully ghettofabulous!!! I bet NO author has EVER thought of that! (Hey Shoe Queen Blogger Serenity 23, I think you should do that when YOUR book comes out, girl!)

And Tayari has given me some of the best writing advice ever… She sent an email one day after I posted a comment on her blog the first time, about how I was not an aspiring writer, but how I am a writer because of what's in my heart... So, um... I walk around the job with my nose in the air...

Step BACK! I am a writer... GET THE F*** BACK! (LOL!)

I expected someone to pass around an offering plate after Saturday’s Q&A after all the knowledge she dropped… I needed a tape recorder or something... I AM SO INSPIRED!

…but, um... when you make Oprah’s book club, homegirl, or win the Pulitzer, etc…

Don’t ACT like you don’t know me… I’m not all that quiet…Don’t have me out in the audience getting “negroidal” and embarrassing you… Don't let the ATLien come out of me!!

LOL!!

But seriously, if you haven’t read anything by Tayari Jones, do yourself a favor and cop one of her books… She has a couple of short pieces over on her blog that left me speechless and clutching my imaginary pearls (Have You Known Me Lately? and Some Thing Blue).

Look here, um Tayari...

Those two stories were a bit, I don't know... FULLY loaded with possibilities. Tayari, I'm going to need for you to stretch those two stories out into epic novels, and go ahead and put those out as soon as possible, if you don't mind... I need to know what happens to those main characters...

Just a request :)

Do yourself a favor and check out my favorite author!

Trust me... It won’t be too long before you wish you had!!