Free Within Ourselves by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Free Within Ourselves by Jewell Parker Rhodes

A Bird by Bird for the African-American market--A top-notch writer's guide filled with practical guidance, essays, and journal exercises for the African-American writer including advice from E.Lynn Harris, Charles Johnson, and Yolanda Joe.

In her introduction, Jewell Parker Rhodes writes: "Never (in four years of college or five years of graduate school) was I assigned an exercise or given a story example that included a person of color...While the educational system and the publishing world have become progressively more welcoming of African-American authors, there is still little attention to educating, supporting, and sustaining the writing process of African-American authors. Free Within Ourselves is a solid first step--it is the book I wished I had when I started out as a writer. It is meant to be a song of encouragement for African-American artisits and visionaries. Free Within Ourselves is a step-by-step introduction to fictional technique, exploring story ideas, and charting one's progress, as well as a resource guide for publishing fiction."

For the legions of people who have a novel stuck in their word processors, help is finally on the way! Free Within Ourselves is an excellent guide to all the elements necessary to crafting fiction: character development, point of view, plot, atmosphere, dialogue, diction, sentence variety, and revision. Writing techniques are taught using exercises, journaling, story examples, and analyses of famous writing fragments, as well as several complete stories (including those of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Dandicat, among others). The book is further enhanced by inspirational advice from successful contemporary black writers (such as Bebe Moore Campbell, Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates, John Edgar Wideman, and others), a bibliography, and a guide to workshops, journals, magazines, contests, and fellowships supportive of black arts.

Jewell Parker Rhodes is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction author whose works include Voodoo Dreams, Season (previously titled Voodoo Season), Yellow Moon (formerly titled Yellow Moon), Magic City, Douglass' Women, Free Inside Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Writers, and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction. Virginia G. Piper Professor in Creative Writing and artistic director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for the Arts Arizona State University's Piper Center for Creative Writing She is a resident of Scottsdale, Arizona.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385491754
ISBN 10	0385491751
Title	Free Within Ourselves
Author	Jewell Parker Rhodes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Main Street Books
Year published	1999-10-05
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.