African American Women Writers

A double-shot of street lit fiction - two novellas about women betrayed who are out for nothing less than revenge. In Clark's Enemy in my Bed, Kreesha may rule the weed scene in Memphis, but she can't control the way she feels about married Reign. When Reign betrays her to the Feds, she's got a bullet with his name on it and nothing will stand in her way. In Swinson's Keeping My Enemies Closer, Larissa falls for a man in jail and smuggles in weed for him - but when she's caught and ends up behind bars, her best friend Tarisha steals her man - and Larissa's after payback.

In this gritty urban drama, New York Times bestselling author Wahida Clark tells the story of a woman who thinks she has everything, but who really has everything to lose starting with her best friend, and ending with her life. Brianna and Shan couldn't be more different. From her $1,200 weave to her closet full of Gucci, Prada, and Chanel, Brianna believes that men were born to bankroll her lifestyle. Shan likes to make her own money by working for a living at a men's prison and prefers Sean John, Baby Phat, and Fubu to Jimmy Choo. Still, despite appearances, Shan and B are sisters where it counts or so they think.

n Pimping Fictions, Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre. He evaluates the artistic and symbolic representations of pimps, sex-workers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries in African American crime literature--characters looking to escape the racial containment of prisons and the ghetto. Gifford also explores the struggles of these black writers in the literary marketplace, from the era of white-owned publishing houses like Holloway House--that fed books and magazines like Players to eager black readers --to the contemporary crop of African American women writers reclaiming the genre as their own.

Focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg's study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women's popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.

Street literature, currently the most widely read form of Black popular fiction, addresses one of the most pertinent problems in the United States: The system of mass incarceration and the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color. In particular, street literature illustrates what the book examines as 'street-prison symbiosis'--a mutual linkage between streets of low-income neighborhoods and prisons that manifests itself not only within the narratives, but also in the circulation of writers, novels, financial means and knowledge between the two locations. The book offers an interdisciplinary spatial analysis that draws upon the close readings of selected novels and interviews with (formerly) incarcerated authors, publishers and distributors of street literature. It explores how actors in the scene simultaneously rely on the close linkage while also using street literature both as a form of writing and cultural-economic practice to challenge marginalizing environments.