Two Grants

Several years ago I formed the Literary Freedom Project, http://literaryfreedom.org, a non-profit arts organization that publishes Mosaic Literary Magazine, http://mosaicmagazine.org; as well as develops curriculum based on the content of each issue; and hosts the Reverse Festival, http://www.reversefestival.com/06.html, an annual literary arts event. All these efforts require funding. Here are two upcoming grants that I'm applying for. You may also want to apply.

NYSCA: deadline April 1
http://www.nysca.org/public/guidelines/literature/book_publication.htm

The Literary Magazine Publication category offers support to noncommercial literary magazines. Publishers must principally publish poetry, fiction, drama, or literary (creative) nonfiction. The Program welcomes new applicants to these categories.

On-line publications will be reviewed separately from print publications, and are strongly advised to consult with Program staff well before the March registration deadline.

Grants in these categories are awarded on a multi-year basis.

NEH: deadline April 2
http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) invite applications to the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program. This program is designed to encourage innovations in the digital humanities. By awarding relatively low-dollar grants during the planning stages, the goal is to identify projects that are particularly innovative and have the potential to make a positive impact on the humanities.

Cross Bronx Online Journal

What do James Baldwin, Cynthia Ozick, Paddy Chayevsky, Richard Avedon, Samuel Clemens, Stanley Kubrick, Herman Melville, Joe Conzo, and Edgar Allen Poe have in common? They all site the Bronx as influential to their development as an artist.


The Bronx Council on the Arts is pleased to announce the launching of the new digital literary journal Cross Bronx. The online publication will encompass the best writing and digital art with a primary focus on Bronx writers and artists. The journal will be published three times per year, beginning in April, and feature BCA’s award-winning artists alongside commissioned works. Submissions from both emerging and established writers and artists are encouraged. The deadline is Monday, March 3, 2008. The premiere issue will be available Monday, March 31, 2008.

BCA is seeking electronic submissions of previously unpublished short fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and digital photography/art. Preference will be given to Bronx artists or artist who site the Bronx as influential to their work. Submitted work must adhere to the following guidelines:

Fiction & Creative Non-Fiction
Submissions limited to 8,500 words or approximately 20 double-spaced pages.
email: prosesubmit@bronxarts.org

Poetry
Submissions of up to three (3) poems per author
email: poetrysubmit@bronxarts.org

Original Digital Art/Photography
Up to three (3) submissions per artist, with a maximum file size of 100 megabytes.
email: artphotosubmit@bronxarts.org

Criticism or Artist interviews
Submit a short proposal, 250 words or less, for consideration before submitting the actual work.
email: sonya@bronxarts.org

When submitting Include your full name, mailing address, and e-mail address in the body of the e-mail. All text pages must be titled and numbered with one-inch margins, double-spaced and typed in 12-point font.

Send questions relating to submissions to sonya@bronxarts.org.

About the editors

Sonya Chung is the 2007 Bronx Writers' Center Literary Fellow. Sonya’s short fiction and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sonora Review, Cream City Review, and BOMB Magazine, among others. She is also the recipient of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize Nomination, and a Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Finalist award. She has recently completed her first novel and is at work on a second.

Helen Dano is the 2007 Bronx Writers' Center Literary Fellow. Helen is the author of the Hawaiian childrens' book, The Little Makana (Bess Press, Honolulu). She was born in Hawaii and grew up in Kalihi, a western suburb of Honolulu, and then moved further west to what was then the sugarcane town of Waipahu, the subject of her work-in-progress, 'Aina: Waipahu, a narrative poem.

Kensington Goes O.G.

Kensington Acquires Holloway House Backlist
By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 2/20/2008 6:37:00 AM

Kensington Publishing has acquired most of the publishing assets of Holloway House Publishing in Los Angeles, the original publisher of such classic black crime writers as Donald Goines, adding an historic trove of gritty African American popular literature to its publishing program. The acquisition includes about 400 backlist titles which will become part of a new imprint at Kensington called Holloway House Classics. Holloway House also publishes a range of popular fiction and nonfiction titles including biographies of famous African Americans.

Kensington’s Holloway House Classics will begin releasing titles in mass market and trade formats, in addition to releasing original urban fiction that complements the line. Holloway House Classics will join Kensington’s growing list of African American oriented imprints like Dafina, Urban Soul and Vibe Street Lit.

The acquisition does not include seven titles by Robert Beck, better known as Iceberg Slim, a former pimp turned bestselling author, whose books sold millions of copies. He is the author of such titles as Trick Baby and My Life as a Pimp and his works are credited with providing the inspiration for the Blaxploitation film era of the 1970s and are often cited as influences by both hip-hop artists and Urban Fiction writers. Holloway House and the Beck estate will retain the rights to his books and Kensington will act as a distributor of Iceberg Slim titles.

Kensington CEO Steven Zacharius credited the deal to a strong market for classic black crime fiction and cited Kensington’s expertise and distribution muscle in the market for African American commercial reading. Zacharius said that the market for the kind of urban fiction Halloway offers, “is stronger today than when these books were first released.”And he said that Kensington’s sales and distribution channels will allow it “to bring Holloway House’s classic works of fiction to a much wider audience.”

The Oprah e-Touch

Free Business Book Is Web Sensation

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 16, 2008

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Oprah touch doesn't just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman's ''Women & Money'' were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey's television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, www.oprah.com, for a period of 33 hours.

''I believe `Women & Money' is the most important book I've ever written,'' Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. ''So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer.''

The download offer ''has built excitement for Suze's book across all formats,'' Julie Grau, the book's publisher, said in a statement.

According to Saturday's statement from Winfrey, more than 1.1 million copies of Orman's financial advice book were downloaded in English, and another 19,000 in Spanish. The demand compares to such free online sensations as ''The 9-11 Commission Report,'' which the federal government made available for downloads, and Stephen King's e-novella, ''Riding the Bullet.''

The publishing community has endlessly debated the effects of making text available online, with some saying that free downloading is a valuable promotional tool and others worrying that sales for paper editions would be harmed. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers each have sued Google for its plans to scan and index books for the Internet.

The offer for ''Women & Money,'' originally released a year ago by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc., has not kept people from buying the traditional version. As of Saturday, the book ranked No. 6 on Amazon.com. The paper edition of ''The 9-11 Commission Report,'' published in 2004 by W.W. Norton and Co., was a best seller for months.

''I can tell you that with respect to the `9-11 Report,' the free download did not seem to hurt sales at all,'' Norton publisher Drake McFeely told The Associated Press on Saturday. ''There were people who wanted it quickly, in a less convenient form, and that was clearly a different market from the people who wanted the traditional book.''

He said free downloading of books does concern publishers, but ''if Norton had been given the opportunity for an Oprah Winfrey plug, and part of the deal was making the book free online, we would have gladly taken it.''

LOVEHATE, reality

Felicia Pride, the original book "don diva," wrote this piece for Publisher's Weekly.

Word-of-Mouth Top Book-Buying Decision
by Felicia Pride -- Publishers Weekly, 2/11/2008



Among African-American consumers, 33% buy five to 10 books a year and they generally decide what to buy through word-of-mouth, according to an e-mail survey of 1,285 consumers.

The African-American culture survey was conducted by Global Market Insight Inc. (GMI), a marketing intelligence firm based in Bellevue, Wash. It surveyed book-buying habits in 2006. According to Jensen Gadley, PR specialist for GMI, the questionnaire was sent via e-mail to a subset of the company’s African-American specialty panel.

The survey also asked respondents to select possible reasons why more African-American–authored books have not gained large mainstream readership. More than 60% indicated that African-American titles were narrowly marketed only “to an African-American audience,” and 35% indicated that “most African-American authored books don’t appeal to a mainstream audience.”

The majority of respondents, 52%, said that the last book they read was not written by an African-American author, while 40% said their last book had been by an African-American. And despite the continued popularity of street lit/urban fiction, more than 50% of respondents said that themes of sex and drugs do not appeal to them. “I was surprised by many of the findings,” said Gadley, who noted that pigeonholing seems to “play a role in why many African-American–authored books don’t hit it big.”

The study also looks at economics, social status and interracial dating in the black community. The full results are available at www.gmi-mr.com.

Recommended by a friend or family member 55%
Bestsellers list 34%
Other 25%
Reviews from African-American critics 20%
Essence bestellers list 18%
Recommended by a book club 17%
Recommended by Oprah 12%
Reviews from non–African-American critics 12%
Recommended by Oprah’s book club 11%
Reviews from a non–African-American newspaper 9%
Reviews from an African-American newspaper 8%

SOURCE: GMI

Fiction 29%
Nonfiction 12%
Inspirational 9%
Gospel 9%
Other 7%
Biography 6%
Self-help 6%
Motivational 5%
Motivational/African-American literature 4%
Inspirational/African-American literature 3%
Street life (Ghetto lit) 3%
Literature 2%
Science 2%
Politics 1%
Chicklit 1%

SOURCE: GMI

LOVEHATE/Old Man River

There's been an increasingly harsh tone coming from the bottom of the slave ship. Negroes at the bottom of the pile are becoming more critical of the ones on the top of the pile. This is my response to Bridgette Davis's piece on theRoot.com



This street/urban lit discussion is becoming a sad commentary. Not on the state of writing, booksellers, literary magazine, or mega-chains but on the entrenched sense of privilege writers who deem themselves "literary" have. To blame anyone but yourselves is unfair. As a publisher of a literary magazine, Mosaic, and founder of a commercial site, MosaicBooks.com, I walk the not-so fine line between both worlds. I know one thing, commercial writers hustle as if every meal their children will eat depends on a book sale. Winter or summer, day or night urban authors are looking for new ways to sell books. They’ve flipped the Harlem Book Fair on its head, mastered the art of self promotion, and have made it almost dangerous for me to identify myself as someone who operates a potential marketing vehicle. Writing is not viewed as an art form but as a means to a financial end. And at the end of the day that's all that matters. Sell more books and your publisher will print more, sell more and bookstores will move you to the front of the shelf, sell more and you will break through the three-book glass ceiling.

One of the problems is our love for the Black Renaissance of the 20s and 30s and for the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s. These glory days informed many of the classic literary writers we hold in high esteem --Hurston, Hughes, Brooks, Wright, Baldwin. Even during the 60s and 70s, for the most part, there were only books for entertainment or to gain knowledge. Those days are dead. Books are no longer the only game in town. Today there's the internet, 100 cable channels, ipods, and video games among many other distractions. These are the competitors. Not other writers.

There’s no dumbing down. There are more Black literary writers being published than ever before. But what's dumb is the idea that literary books will sell themselves; writers on a tenure track no longer have to do book readings and signings outside of the city (or university campus) in which they reside. What's dumb is not taking the Relentless Aaron model dissecting it and flipping it to work for literary writers. The continued barrage of urban lit criticism is almost pathological in it absolution of literary writers to participate fully in what it takes to sell a book in 2008.

It's my hope that ringShout, a new organization formed to support literary writing, of which Bridgett Davis is a founding member, was not set up to solely hate and deride hard working people, but as a modern means to support what they believe in while treating all outside its sphere with benign respect.

Black literature is strong. There are just a group of writers who see this for what it is a numbers game. Publishing more literary writers won't change the outcome. Publishing writers who believe so deeply in their work that they're willing to alter their lives will.

More LOVEHATE

This post appears on Felicia'a Pride's blog, The Backlist.net

ringShout
Breaking Street Lit and Why Complaining Ain't Cute
Written by felicia
Monday, 11 February 2008

I prefer doers over talkers.

So when I heard that a few great writers/literary folks were getting together--Chris Jackson (Executive Editor of Spiegel and Grau, a division of Random House), Martha Southgate (writer), Eisa Ulen, Alison Meyers (executive director of Cave Canem) and Bridgett M. Davis (writer)--to promote great literary works by black authors, I gave them a church handclap. They call the new venture ringShout .

Cause honestly, ya'll know I'm a promoter of books and many times BackList leans toward the literary ones (that's one of my personal reading preferences), but I am jive tired of hearing writers complain about street lit, its adverse affect on their book sales, etc. I'm like Black people, come on. (Did I just paraphrase Bill Cosby?). I have no problem with folks expressing their thoughts on the issue, but many times, in the back of mind, I'm wondering, "What are YOU doing to change things and propel the black literary community forward?"

Have you started an organization and literary fair like Malaika Adero and the Up South board? Do you run a website (for the love, cause it doesn't really pay) like BackList to promote great writers? Do you have a book reviewing team that reviews more than 700 books a year like Rawsistaz? Or did you launch a website that blogs about the issues relevant to black writers like Blogginginblack.com? Do you run an annual children's book fair like Vanesse Lloyd Sgambati? Do you put on an annual event like Renee Flagler's Self-Publishing Symposium? Are you like Ron Kavanaugh and run a literary magazine like Mosaic? Or did you go all out and start your own publishing house like Tina McElroy Ansa and her DownSouth Press?

Tell me something. But lawd, stop complaining. It's played out and unproductive.

This is definitely what I could have thought about Bridgett Davis's piece on The Root called "Break the Street Lit Habit" which discusses the lack of support for black literary authors. It's well-written and definitely offers tons of great suggestions for black bookstore owners, publishers, black media, etc. However, the piece could easily read like one of those "what everyone else, besides myself should be doing" editorials. But Davis and the ringShot collective are taking matters into their own hands. I look forward to the crew implementing many of the ideas in her editorial instead of waiting for others to do so.

It starts with the individual. Next time you think about complaining about something, ask yourself, "What am I doing to make it better?" Damn, I'm on a Cosby roll!

I applaud ringShout and look forward to their forthcoming initiatives.

LOVEHATE

Eisa Ulen recently revisted the Urban lit debate on her blog, http://eisaulen.com/blog/index.php. The post is a follow up to a piece she wrote for Crisis magazine. I'm not sure where this debate can go.

Simba Sana of Karibu Books

This podcast with Simba Sana, co-owner of Karibu Books, discusses the closing of the stores, Black empowerment, and his future in the book business. The interview was recorded by Ella Curry of the Black Author Network on BlogTalkRadio.com.


powered by ODEO

The Brand New Heavies

What do you call a room full of Black editors, writers, poets, publishers, and educators in one place? A good start. Or, at least, an earnest one. This past Friday, I attended the launch party for a new literary organization known as ringShout. The "ringShouters" are (in ascending height order) Martha Southgate, Bridgett Davis, Alison Myers, Eisa Nefertari Ulen, and Chris Jackson. I will forgo linking to or listing everyone's title. The "furious five" united in response to an essay Martha wrote in the New York Times Book Review. In which she addressed the lack of opportunity that Black writers face for publishing three or more books.

There was a certain irony in hosting an event to launch an independent Black lit organization in a corporate suite of the Random House headquarters. But I'll forgive youthful indiscretions. Plus it was such a pleasure spotting or chatting with, in no particular order, John McGregor, Tara Roberts, Victor Lavelle, Marcus Reeves, Matt Johnson, Natasha Tarpley, Netihisi [sp?] Coates, Marcus Reeves, Tyhembas Jess, Marita Golden, Cornelius Eady, Toni Asanta Lightfoot, Jabari Asim, E. Ethelbert Miller, Kadija George, Dr. Brenda Greene, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Dorothea Smartt, Esther Armah, Linda Duggins, Michael Thomas, Marie Brown, Myronn Hardy, Emily Robateau, Malaika Adero, Marlon James, Gilda Squire, Danyel Smith, Patrick Oliver, Quaraysh Ali Lansana, Asali Solomon (I think), David Dent, Linda Villarosa, Kelly Martin, Michael Gonzalez... For every person I recognized there were four people I did not.

But besides the cheek-kissing and wine, plenty wine, there was serious business at hand. Or maybe one day there will be serious business at hand. Right now there are some solid ideas with spongy underpinnings. Take it from someone who knows spongy. But don't fret, they're new, full of vim, and still finding their way. So far there's a serious list of literary writers --two degrees of separation from the ringShouters at best-- that can be used in schools. If we are going to increase or, at least, sustain readership junior and high schools will be the first line of offense. Check out the blog for further information. Here's the nascent monologue.

Mission
Founded in 2007 by a group of writers, editors, and booksellers, ringShout: A Place for Black Literature is dedicated to recognizing, reclaiming and celebrating excellence in contemporary literary fiction and nonfiction by black writers in the United States.

Why the name ringShout?
One of the first dances created by Africans brought to America as slaves in the 1700s, the ring shout was a sacred circle dance of salvation that enabled a community to find perseverance, provided solace and rejuvenation, and sheltered many early nuances of Africanist culture and practice. --Adapted from Thea Nerissa Barnes, The Association of Dance of the African Diaspora Dictionary 2005-2006

We hope that our ringShout can be the same for serious, skilled black writers creating ambitious fiction. We also want to assert our centrality to all facets of the American experience, literary and otherwise.

Like so many of us with ambitious dreams for the Black aesthetic you quickly realize that it's a long process with more lows than highs. I selfishly believe that what I am doing with Mosaic and the Literary Freedom Project, and ringShout will too, is worth the hard work. I'm ten years in, battle fatigued, and just started reading Asali Solomon's Get Down and realized, "Yeah, it's worth it."