Lat weekend the National Book Club Conference, an event that usually takes place in Atlanta, hit Chicago with a lively crowd of avid readers and authors. Susan McHenry and Ken Smikle of Black Issues Book Review did an amazing job of organizing an intimate event, where readers and writers could mix and mingle in style on the Miracle Mile. Curtis Bunn, chair of the NBCC, spoke about this year’s exciting NBCC – Ghana trip and this new international component of the annual conference.

I was honored to be a Featured Author and meet sisters from South Carolina, different areas in the Midwest, New York, Philly, and even a homegirl from my high school – dear ol’ Western High in Baltimore, Maryland. I was also thrilled to meet fellow writers Tina McElroy Ansa, Virginia DeBerry, Donna Grant, Mary Morrison, and Kimberla Lawson Roby.
Old friends Lyah Beth LeFlore, ReShonda Tate Billingsley, and Terrie Williams were also Featured Authors who gave great presentations.

Lyah Beth LeFlore, whom I met back when she was producing the television show New York Undercover, and author of three books now, presented her latest, I Got Your Back, with co-author Eddie Levert. She and Eddie spoke movingly about the life and legacy of Eddie’s son Gerald.

ReShonda Tate Billingsley, whom I met at last year’s NABJ Convention, was still glowing from the birth of her baby girl several weeks ago. Mamma is moving – she recently quit her job to focus on her fiction writing full-time and help produce films based on her prolific work as a novelist.

Terrie Williams was also there, and she talked about her forthcoming anthology, Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting. Terrie, publicist to the biggest in Black entertainment, including people like Eddie Murphy and Puffy, wrote an achingly honest essay for Essence magazine about her own personal struggle with depression. It received the most reader response of any piece published by Essence that year and launched her mission to lift the stigma of depression so more Black folk who need to will seek help. She’s doing wonderful work to free our community from the emotional chains that bind so many of us. Check out her podcast.

Kimberla Roby gave a powerful presentation that included her own journey to writing. I was glad to meet this sister and feel inspired by her personal narrative. A former business executive, she, with the support of her husband and mother, worked the 9 to 5 all day and then drove straight home to spend hours every evening writing her first book. After all that dedication and focus, she was rejected by agents and publishers. But she persevered, published on her own, and sold so many books that she has been picked up by a major house and now focuses on writing full-time.

I also met Mary Morrison, who talked about the explicit content of her work and her struggle with sexual abuse.

After the Saturday readings and presentations, I joined Tina McElroy Ansa and writing team Virginia De Berry and Donna Grant, all new friends, for dinner. It was wonderful to listen to these sisters share the wisdom of their experience with the book publishing industry.

It was also wonderful to hear Tina talk more about her exciting new venture, Down South Press, a publishing company she founded just this year. She says the responses to Down South have been overwhelmingly supportive and positive. She and her filmmaker husband still manage to find time to write every day as she gets her business off the ground. Of course, in addition to Down South and writing every day, Tina also runs the Sea Island Writers Retreat. She does all this while traveling extensively to promote the projects she juggles so effortlessly. She’ll be at the UpSouth Festival here in New York this month.

Virginia and Donna must enter the Matrix as some kind of writer-team superstar anomaly every time they sit down to write together. Writing is not generally a collaborative art, like film or theater or dance. It’s not performance art, and writers are notorious for wanting to work alone – for some even going so far as to resent the input of their own editors. Yet, these two women have sold nearly a million copies of the novels they write as a total team. They claim they just sort of write, either can jump in at any time with a new way of thinking about their prose, and “nothing is sacred,” meaning, of course, either of them can challenge what the other is writing. That’s an amazing process – amazing because so few writers could handle it. These two are perfectly suited to the task of working together, though. When they talk, they’re almost like twins who know each other so well that they can finish each other’s sentences without missing a beat. Look for the audio version of their work, which they’ll be recording themselves for the very first time, soon.

I urge all readers to look for the next conference. I was impressed with the high spirits of everyone in Chicago last weekend and the glowing reviews they all gave of the Atlanta NBCC experience.