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Books by Jill Nelson
Let's Get It On: A Novel /
Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home
on an Island
Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
/
Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman
Police Brutality /
Sexual
Healing
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WRITING
SEXUAL
HEALING
An Interview with Jill Nelson
To this point, you've made your reputation
writing nonfiction. Why a novel?
I love writing nonfiction, but life is about
challenges, and writing a novel has definitely been a challenge.
This has been an opportunity for me to stretch myself as a
writer in ways I haven't since college, when I wrote mainly
fiction and thought journalism was something I'd do for a few
years until I wrote a great African American novel. Fiction is
also a way to reach a broader audience. Women read more fiction
than nonfiction, and since I see my first audience as women, a
novel was just the logical and exciting next step in my career.
What was the genesis of this particular
story?
Several
years ago in conversation, a friend was explaining to me why
she'd "retired" from dating. Then she said, "What
black women need is a brothel for women." Her words stuck
in my mind, and I called her and told her I wanted to use her
comment as the framework for a novel. That was fine with her, as
long as I dedicated the book to her, which I have.
Acey
and Lydia, my protagonists, are like so many women I know who
are best friends. They're very different in some ways—Lydia's
a hedonist while Acey's steeped in traditional notions about
relationships—yet they are alike in their ambition, their
sexual desires and needs, and their willingness to overcome fear
and fight for what they believe in. And they are winners, which
was very important to me; literature needs more smart,
ambitious, sexy, wild women who don't get saddled and tamed.
How do you see this new book as building
on your earlier titles?
My
work is always about identity and empowerment, and I see Sexual
Healing as part of that continuum. Many of the issues
discussed in Volunteer Slavery and Straight, No Chaser
are echoed in Sexual Healing in fictional form,
particularly women's struggle to self-define and not be limited
or oppressed by the expectations of others. I'm fascinated by
the ways people go about unearthing, defining, and owning our
true selves in what are often adverse conditions. Sexual
Healing examines those themes, using both business and
sexuality as prisms through which to look at issues of identity
and ownership.
How do you think readers will react to the
way you write about women's experience of sex? Some of the
scenes in the book are very explicit.
I
think women will recognize parts of themselves, their mothers,
daughters, sisters, and friends, not to mention the men in their
lives—from Daddy to their minister to their man—and say
Amen. I think men will learn a lot about women's sexuality
through this book, and that's always good. Some people may be
scandalized, but that's OK, too. The truth is sometimes so
surprising we are taken aback. That's cool, as long as we can
move forward and see the value in what has been revealed. And I
dare anyone to read Sexual Healing and not laugh out
loud.
As for
being explicit, the sex act itself is inherently explicit—or
at least, good sex usually is. I wanted to write about women's
sexual pleasure stripped down to its essence, and avoid the
soft-focus, gauzy, style of writing about sex. Sexual Healing
is about two women's efforts to own their selves, their
business, and their sexuality. In order to write this story, I
had to own all that stuff too, including the sex.
This
meant I had to push the censors, both my own and those of the
larger society, off my shoulders. The mandate of A Sister's Spa
is to give women pleasure on their own terms, so it was
important to be very clear about what women see as pleasurable.
I read a great deal, talked to many women, remembered,
experimented, and, yes, fantasized in order to write the
explicit sections. I wanted those sections to be both a
compelling read and physically arousing, to turn the reader on
intellectually and physically.
Agate
Publishers 1501 Madison St. Evanston, IL 60202
(847) 363-1830
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Jill Nelson
was born and raised in Harlem and has been a working journalist
for over twenty years. She is a graduate of the City College of
New York and the Columbia School of Journalism. Her work has
appeared in numerous publications, including The New York
Times, Essence, The Washington Post, The
Nation, Ms., The Chicago Tribune and the
Village Voice. Jill was a staff writer for the Washington
Post Magazine during its first years of existence, and was named
Washington D.C. Journalist of the Year for her work there. She
freelances and lectures widely, and writes a twice-monthly
column, “On the Verge,” for NiaOnline.com and is a monthly
contributor to the Op Ed page of USA Today.
She was a professor of Journalism at the City College
of New York from 1998 to 2003. Jill wrote the best-selling memoir,
Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience(Noble Press,
hardcover, 1993 and Penguin, paperback, 1994) which won an
American Book Award. |
She is the author of
Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman
(Putnam, Fall 1997, Penguin, Winter 1999) and edited
Police Brutality: An Anthology, for WW Norton, published in
April 2000. Her first novel, /
Sexual
Healing, was released in June 2003. Her latest book, the
non-fiction
Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island
was published in May 2005 by Random House. The mother of an adult
daughter, and a grandmother, she lives in Harlem.
Jill
Nelson Bio
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and
the Education of a President
By
Ron Suskind
A new
book offering an insider's account of the
White House's response to the financial
crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner ignored an order from President
Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of
major banks. According to Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the
incident is just one of several in which
Obama struggled with a divided group of
advisers, some of whom he didn't initially
consider for their high-profile roles.
Suskind interviewed more than 200 people,
including Obama, Geithner and other top
officials . . . The book states Geithner and
the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009
order to consider dissolving banking giant
Citigroup while continuing stress tests on
banks, which were burdened with toxic
mortgage assets. . . .Suskind states that
Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in
his administration while noting that
restructuring the financial system was
complicated and could have resulted in
deeper financial harm. . . . In a February
2011 interview with Suskind, Obama
acknowledges another ongoing criticism—that
he is too focused on policy and not on
telling a larger story, one the public could
relate to. Obama is quoted as saying he was
elected in part because "he had connected
our current predicaments with the broader
arc of American history," but that such a
"narrative thread" had been lost.—Gopusa
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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