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Chairs

November 21, 2013
Tags: diversity, women, Inclusion
(Blog first posted on Women Writers, Women Books site, and Homeslicemag.com)

Chairs I have sat in. They’re usually too big, those conference table chairs at editorial meetings I attend, or seats set in a row for panelists at author events, with a copy of our latest book propped on the long table in front of us.

It’s difficult to be one of the “important people” in the room–and there I perch, feeling like Lily Tomlin’s comic character Edith Ann: feet barely touching the floor, knees unable to bend properly around the too-extended front of the chair.  Read More 
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The Great March for Jobs and Freedom, 1963

August 27, 2013
Tags: March on Washington 1963, writing, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Fire in My Soul, Mama's Child
(Blog first posted on Women Writers, Women Books site)

I’d bought the car at a police auction for $25. You could do that then in New York City: ride the subway to some out-of-the-way lot full of junked cars, make a bid, and the next day, the car might  Read More 
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On Writing and Not Writing

August 22, 2013
Tags: writing, not writing, work/life balance, writing life, Meg Waite Clayton
There actually is a difference. As an author and columnist who’s been steadily writing, nearly daily, for twenty years, in the last few months I’ve become “a writer who emails, and writes on the side,” as my colleague Meg Waite Clayton says. Promotion for Mama’s Child has spawned endless emails: details  Read More 
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Shelf Awareness Book Brahmin Interview, May 24, 2013

June 17, 2013
Tags: Reading List, Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alice Walker, The Color of Water, Concept of Race
On your nightstand now:
Arnold Rampersad's biography, The Life of Langston Hughes. Rampersad is nearly as lyrical as his subject's writing. Reading the biography right after Langston Hughes's own two volume memoir (The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander) is a joyful dip into the world of a man with the biggest heart imaginable, who revolutionized American poetry by writing in African American vernacular. Stanzas like "Good morning, Daddy!/Ain't you heard/The boogie-woogie rumble/Of a dream deferred" set critics rumbling about low-down trash-talk, and why would anybody want to read that?  Read More 
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Creating Fictional Characters

June 14, 2013
Tags: writing, fiction, character development
Creating fictional characters is one of the most mysterious aspects of the enigmatic activity we call creative writing. Here I sit, the author of a novel, imagining beings who have never really lived. Often they are composites of many people I’ve known, fused with bits of my own experience or personality; but ultimately they become their own people, whose voices I hear.  Read More 
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It's True: I Love to Write

May 21, 2013
Tags: writing, spiritual joy, authors, writing process
"What, another book already?" friends exclaim. "You must be so disciplined." They shake their heads in disbelief.

Well, no, not really. The fact is that I love to write. Shaping each sentence, piling them up one upon another in a logical sequence, creating a clear beginning, middle, and end--all these activities fill me with  Read More 
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The Oddity of the Writing Profession

May 11, 2013
Tags: writers, authors, writing, publishing
Being a full-time writer is a strange occupation. I work all day alone in a tiny cottage behind my house, hunched over my computer, lost in an imaginary world. If I weren't producing coherent literature, some might consider this behavior peculiar, at best--or worthy of psychiatric intervention.

Even at night my characters follow me,  Read More 
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On Becoming a Writer; 1st Books Blog

May 9, 2013
Tags: writing, author, publishing, multicultural, biracial, feminism

At twenty I married a writer, though I had no idea how to become one myself. The year before I’d stood on a street corner at a New York City pay phone and called Simon and Schuster, telling the woman I reached that I wanted to be “an editor or a writer.” No one at the house was the least bit impressed, or intereted. Read More 

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She Writes Press Interview, April 29, 2013

May 1, 2013
Tags: Biracial family, writing process, Rewriting
Nan Fink Gefen: Can you tell us about the genesis of Mama’s Child?

Joan Lester: I’m a member of a biracial family and also a veteran of the civil rights and women’s liberations movements, which rocked this country during the 1960s and ’70s--and we’re still feeling the ripples. Those movements  Read More 
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Our "racial" language

February 19, 2013
Tags: biracial, mixed race, language of race, biracial families, equality, inequality
Even the words we choose to express the realities of our families can be loaded. At various times I've used different phrases, from "biracial" to "mixed race" to (even, long ago) "First World" and "Third World." Someone in my family has always objected to one or another descriptor: "Mixed race makes me feel like  Read More 
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