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 Name, gender and birthplace:
Ann Allen Shockley; female;Louisville, KY
Current or most recent project:
My new novel, Celebrating Hotchclaw, revolves around the one hundredth birthday celebration of Hotchclaw College, a small, financially struggling private Historically Black College in the fictional town of Mayfield, Tennessee. Behind the jubilation of survival are professional, psychological and sexual conflicts among the president and faculty. The shocking discovery about one of its favorite faculty members adds fuel to the flames that set off a maze of entanglements leading to a predominantly white university in the North. This could well be the first novel of its kind to focus on the internal aspects of black academia and the first to address cross-dressing in black American fiction. Issues of homophobia, class and race are explored. The most notable challenge was getting the book published.
Earliest memory of being a writer and first publication experience:
My earliest memory of first wanting to be a writer was as a student at the segregated Madison Junior High School in Louisville, Kentucky, where my English teacher read something I had written and said that maybe someday I might become a writer. I became editor of the school paper and published in it.
I was first professionally published when working as a staff writer one summer while a sophomore in college for The Louisville Defender, a weekly black paper. I wrote short-short stories, articles and a teenage column.
How do you identify and nurture ideas for new projects?
Writing ideas are perceived by seeing and having an innate awareness of literature, both fiction and non-fiction.
| My Favorites | Color: None Food: Anything I am eating at the time. Gadget: None Drink: Vodka martinis Movie: Anything with a good story line without multiple car chases, bang bans, and head knocking. Like "Monster's Ball", "The Priest", and "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge" Performer(s): Aretha Franklin, Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand |
Authors/writers/performers or others that have influenced your artistic style:
Can't think of any. 2-3 books or CDs that everyone should own:
To name books that should be a part of someone else's book collection is difficult to do, because personal libraries are created by reading tastes and interests. Off-hand for LGBT collection I would suggest the following 1. James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name, which is an excellent collection of essays, as others he has done, about race in American society that still hold truths. Or, his fiction, particularly Another Country. Baldwin stands out as a pioneering black gay writer, and to my knowledge, so far , is the only openly black gay to be on a U.S. postage stamp. Anything by Baldwin is a collection's item.
2. The groundbreaking anthology, Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction. edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise. This historical anthology covers the period of writing from 1900 to 200 with known and lesser known writers. 3. Audre Lorde's Zami:A New Spelling of My Name, that introduces a genre she calls "biomythography." It is an autobiography that reads like fiction by a courageous, pioneering black lesbian poet and writer who made waves and died too soon. Advice for aspiring writers?
For aspiring writer's keep writing. Disregard rejections. Some of the world's most famous writers have had loads of them. Preview of my upcoming project(s):
At this point I don't have any. |
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