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June 14, 2006
Outside the Lines: Black Lesbian Lit
Posted at June 14, 2006 06:43 AM in Media / Television .
by Linda Villarosa, June 14, 2006
In the first edition of her new monthly column for AfterEllen.com, Linda Villarosa explores the increasing number of lesbian voices in black erotic literature.
Read any good erotica lately? Probably not if you're looking for African-American lesbian love.
Black women--straight girls--are having plenty of literary sex. The explosion of African-American women's erotica is one of the most healthy and also surprising trends in book publishing today. That was the big buzz late last month at Book Expo America (BEA)--publishing's annual industry confab.
This year 25,000 booklovers crammed into the yawning canyon of a convention center in Washington DC where 2,000 publishers hawked their wares for thousands of booksellers from around the world.
In the African-American interest section of nearly every bookstore, novels like Making Him Want It, Crackhead, Riding Dirty on I-95 and Nasty Girls, are hip-checking literary superstars like Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston off the shelves. At this time a couple of years ago, authors of this so called "street lit" or "ghetto fiction," were hawking their self-published paperbacks on 125th Street in Harlem or selling their books out of the trunks of cars or at beauty shops. Now they have multi-book deals. [Read More]
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