Teen Writers Bloc

I don’t think I’m going to say anything different than what many of my classmates have already said: This program was really worth it because of the group as a whole, the fantastic other writers I was surrounded by, more so than the professors.

Don’t get me wrong, our professors were terrific — but we only had them for one semester each. And then there were summer vacations and winter breaks and all that time we didn’t have to write if we didn’t want to. So really, it is that old adage of what you put in is what you get out.

If you decide to apply to a program like this one, think of it as a gift, a period of time in which you can really dedicate yourself to pursuing something you love. I think the most important thing I learned was DON’T GIVE UP. I’m not the only person who tried and failed with a first manuscript. And, as I’ve said before, it was pretty devastating. But I still had time. I had a whole two semesters to write something new, and I did, and what was the result? I just signed with an amazing agent, Charlie Olsen at Inkwell Management. Remember all that fear of “Dear Author” emails and crying into large glasses of wine? Well, I faced it, overcame it, and won. Two years ago, I would never have thought this possible.

So, really, it all came down to DON’T GIVE UP. Push yourself. If you’re lucky enough to be surrounded by incredibly talented writers like I was, make them push you, too. If not, find at least one person to hold you accountable. This was not the path I thought my life would take, and I don’t think it ever would have happened without The New School. Are there flaws in the program? Sure. But I don’t regret this giant (and expensive) leap of faith, not for a single second.

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I can’t believe it’s almost over. How did two years go by so quickly? When I first started the program, I didn’t have any real goals in mind. I think all I was really expecting, as the thesis requirements stated, was to have “a manuscript of 50 to 70 pages of stories or other fiction or nonfiction, or a completed children’s book in a state appropriate for publication.” (I also noticed that the term “state appropriate for publication” is only specified for the Writing for Children concentration. The others are only required to have a novel or book in progress.)

Was it worth it? And if I could do it over again, would I do it differently? Some parts would be yes. I would have written more. I would have been more active in going to the weekend workshops and other writing events. But the parts I wouldn’t have changed were the people I met. Our class was filled with talented people who also became great friends. We had amazing authors and editors who taught our workshop and seminar classes. Just the awesome people I got to know made it worth it.

There are two things I would love to take with me after I graduate. The first is the connection with my classmates. Not only do I value their opinion when they comment on my work, but they’re pretty cool people to know. Of course, anyone who follows Teen Writers Bloc would already realize that! The other is having a thick skin. One thing I’ve learned from the past two years is that some comments about my writing are going to be positive and others will be pretty harsh. Don’t let the bad ones discourage you. When it comes down to it, listen to them all and weed out the ones that will benefit you the most.

So I’ll admit my thesis is not something that’s ready to be published. But working with my peer group and hearing their critiques was a huge part in helping me to improve it. I hope, someday, you’ll be able to find it on the shelves of your nearest bookstore.

Image courtesy of: Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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I’ve followed Teen Writers Bloc pretty much since its inception, and what I’ve loved most about it is the variety of perspectives the bloggers provide on their experience as writers and MFA students. I graduated from The New School Writing for Children program in 2010, and it’s been fun to read their posts and reminisce about my own time there.

The question the bloggers are tackling this month has to do with whether this MFA program is worthwhile. After reading Mary’s response, I realized how different my experience in the program was compared to hers.

Some things haven’t changed. The program still has its benefits and drawbacks, which I’m sure is true of many graduate programs. Like Mary, I didn’t find the adult literature class I took to be very useful, and I was equally offended by the administration’s assumption that children’s literature writers aren’t real writers unless they study adult lit. What a load of crap!

Also, like Mary, the main reason I loved the program was because of the writers I formed a community with while there. The support I receive from them even now, two years later, is invaluable. Not all twelve of us keep in touch anymore, but the five that I do keep in touch with are awesome.

One point Mary made in her post gave me pause:

“Finally, there’s the problem of low expectations. If you wanted to, you could graduate from the program without ever having completed a novel. The thesis requirement is only fifty pages. You could literally write only fifty pages in the entire program and still graduate.” 

Here’s where I respectfully disagree, and where my experience in the program differed.

I agree that MFA applicants need to decide what their expectations are before entering a program like this, because a lot of it is what you make of it. However, I don’t agree with the idea that if you don’t complete a novel by the end of the program, your expectations are too low. It’s not so black and white. The creative section of my thesis was only seventy pages (18,000 words). I certainly wrote way more than seventy pages over the course of the program (since I started several projects before deciding to focus on one), but I didn’t complete an entire novel.

There were two main reasons for this. One was a lack of time. I had a full-time job while in the program, and was also planning my wedding, so I found it hard to write every day. Along with all of the other program requirements (reading a book a week, critiquing several submissions a week, attending readings, and of course attending class), it was a lot to juggle. Second, I had never written a novel before. I entered the program having only ever written short stories.

My personal expectation for the program was to learn more about kid lit (through the literature classes), improve my writing (through the workshops) and get as far into a novel as I could. I would have loved to finish an entire novel, and I wrote as much as I could, but a completed manuscript wasn’t in the cards.

Despite that, I was so proud of my thesis! And I’ve since finished and revised that book. What I really wanted out of the program was to kick start my career, and it did just that.So while I agree that you do have to think about WHY you want to get an MFA and WHAT you want to accomplish, it’s okay if you don’t end up completing a whole manuscript. In fact, I was one of many people in my class who only submitted portions of manuscripts for their theses and completed their books after the program ended. At the time, none of my classmates had agents or book deals. Many of us (myself included) are still working toward that goal. None of us are unmotivated. We were just at an earlier stage of our careers while at The New School. We took our time getting the pages we wrote for our theses right.

One thing that’s very clear about the Class of 2012 is that they are a very motivated and productive bunch. I’m seriously impressed by how they’ve supported each other and pushed one another to write so much. I’m sure they’ll have long and successful careers, and I feel the same way about my old classmates! If there’s one thing I’ve learned from getting an MFA, and being a writer in general, it’s that everyone follows their own journey and writes at their own pace.

Thanks, Teen Writers Bloc, for letting me share my experience!

Ghenet Myrthil is a 2010 graduate of The New School Writing for Children program. She’s currently seeking representation for her contemporary young adult novel. You can find her blogging at www.ghenetmyrthil.com and tweeting @ghenet

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I grew up reading Barbara Park, Louis Sachar, Baby-Sitters Club, S. E. Hinton, Paula Danzinger, Beverly Cleary, the American Girls series, and Lois Lowry. Some of my favorite books from childhood are The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Just as Long as We’re Together and Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great by Judy Blume, the Anne of Green Gables series, Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassedy, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, and Betsy Byers’s The Summer of the Swans. So I had a pretty eclectic taste in books, but one thing never varied: pretty much all of the books and authors I liked focused solely on white characters. If there was a non-white character, s/he was usually around to teach the white kids a lesson on race or tolerance or just a peripheral character who happened to be ethnic, but usually not the main character. (Some of the authors/books/series mentioned above did feature non-white characters, but that was pretty rare and even rarer for the main character to be non-white.)

So I know I should be lamenting the lack of diversity in the books I read as a kid and how it made me think less of myself, but honestly, it didn’t bother me or affect my self-image growing up. I never read books looking for characters that were just like me because I didn’t want to read about me, a poor, biracial girl living with an abusive white mother in an economically-depressed and uneducated black neighborhood who was made fun of for attending mostly-white private schools. I knew that story inside and out and didn’t want to read about it while I was still living it. Books were my escape, my chance to see how normal people lived because my life was very abnormal.

I grew up seeing myself as neither black nor white, but as a mixture of both, and so it didn’t matter what race the characters were so long as they took me away from the problems of real life. But now, as an adult, I realize those books did have an impact on me. As a writer, it’s so easy for me to fall into the default white trap. Creating racially diverse characters is a conscious effort and I have to actively work to make sure that my stories represent people of all skin colors.

When I come up with a new idea, I generally don’t think about race. As I start writing and getting to know my characters, sometimes a light bulb goes off and I think, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if everyone was black or mixed-race like me? But why do I think writing a book about non-whites is a novelty? It all comes back to the books I read growing up. Even though I wasn’t bothered by the lack of diversity as a child, it subconsciously left an impression on me and made me prewired to assume my own characters are white, which is troubling since I’m not even fully-white myself.

In my own writing, I sometimes get a bit heavy-handed with my character descriptions. I feel like I have to shove it in the reader’s face that these characters are not white because if it isn’t explicitly stated, then people will just assume everyone’s white. And, frankly, I’m tired of reading stories exclusively about white people as if people of color don’t exist. We do, and our stories need to be told, too. I now recognize the importance of including a racially diverse cast of characters. Nowadays, I get excited when I find a book with a biracial main character and if the character is female, it’s even better. It feels good to be represented in literature.

Guest blogger Jean-Paul Bass recently decided to quit her job to focus on writing full-time and she swears she doesn’t miss having a regular paycheck at all. She is currently working on her MFA in fiction at The New School and writing a memoir about growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.   

Photo Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Scholastic, HarperCollins, Viking, Dell Yearling, and Puffin

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As we reflect on our time at The New School this month, I am predicting a repeating theme: yes, this degree and endeavor was worth it for ME personally, but I wouldn’t say it’s ALWAYS worth it.

In the course of my time at The New School, I managed to finish three complete drafts for three separate novels and start countless others; I landed an awesome agent, Kate McKean; and I sold my first book in a two-book deal to Bloomsbury. I am 100 percent certain that this would not have happened if I had not taken the plunge, moved across the country and gone back to school. However, I also don’t think I would have reached these goals, and certainly I would not have reached them so quickly, if it weren’t for my classmates. And that’s the problem. Who you end up in class with is completely luck, right?

Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be. When I think about it, our class did practical things that lead to it’s effectiveness. So maybe we should talk about actual steps that will make an MFA, especially The New School Writing for Children MFA, worth it.

1. Write WAY MORE than required. You’re only going to be submitting every few weeks, but you need to write everyday. In my first semester I imposed a two hour a day rule on myself and I was disciplined. I would come home from work, turn my phone off, disconnect my internet, and set an alarm. Then I would sit at my computer until the alarm went off.  By the time I was required to submit my first ten pages, I had close to 80. When it was time for me to submit, I would then go back and edit the ten pages I was going to send. I would have a much better sense of the shape of the whole because I had so much more written. This made it much easier to weed out the helpful criticism during critique.

2. Find a small group of serious writers from within your class and form an extra critique group. Meet regularly and be dedicated to it. Sona, Corey, Dhonielle, Amy and I did this for the first two semester and Sona, Corey, Alyson, Dhonielle, Lenea and I have done this for the final semester. This has been incredibly valuable to me because I get more written with more deadlines, because I get to have a dialogue about my work, and because I get invested in voices outside my own. It’s easier for me to have a realistic (and not overly negative) opinion of my own work when I’m very invested in others’ as well.

3. Start a project together. I think we would all agree that Teen Writers Bloc helped us to become a unit. It also gives us a way to stay connected to each other and our writing after we graduate.  And, when at times we were perhaps a bit frustrated with some select teachers, Teen Writers Bloc helped us feel supported and reminded us that there is a larger purpose to our writing than what’s happening in class.

4. After the first semester, your classmates are going to know your writing better than your teachers do, because they will have read more of it. Find the voices from your classmates that are helpful to you and listen to them. Listen to your teachers, but remember that they’re only with you for a semester. So you also need to find helpful critiquers among your peers.

5. Find the classmates who really know the business and talk post-drafting. Talk about query letters, agents, publishing houses, promotion, and other aspects of the business. Share agent stories. Share queries. (Heck, Sona basically wrote my query for me, and Mary helped me land an agent.). Get invested in each others’ careers because different people have different strengths. Use yours to benefit the entire class, and then tap on others’ shoulders.

6. Trade full manuscripts before your query. You need someone to read from beginning to end, not just in little spurts, and your best bets are going to be the people in your class, provided you have invested in their writing and careers as well.

7. Become friends. Go for drinks or coffee. Take a walk. Throw a holiday party like Corey did for us first semester. Ultimately, this was a positive experience of most of us, but with a huge side of frustration, disappointment, and lack of control. That’s what happens when you’re really passionate about your career. You will need your friends to commiserate and celebrate with, because no one else will understand what you’re talking about. And because sometimes you need to get a good gripe out before you can get back to work.

Photo Credit: Institute Childrens Lit

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Today we’re proud to announce Teen Writers Bloc’s first ever giveaway EVENT!

I just received my copies of my first novel, Wuftoom, from the UPS man, and I can’t wait to share it with the world. In fact, when I got my box of books, I was so excited about sharing it that I had to take a picture and immediately post it on Facebook. Then I had to mail off copies to my parents and my best friend. Then I had to take a copy of the book with me to peer group to show it to my awesome classmates. I still have the book in my backpack, just in case the slightest opportunity to bust it out arises. I’ll probably carry it around for the next year until my second book comes out. And then I’ll be carrying two books around everywhere. Twenty years from now, if all goes well, I’m going to be dragging around a cart.

But my friends and family aren’t the only people I want to share the book with. So … I’m giving away one brand new, signed, hardcover, hot-off-the-presses copy of Wuftoom. The book won’t be officially released until May 8, so the winner of the contest will see it before it’s available in stores!

Here is the summary from the front cover:

Everyone thinks Evan is sick … Everyone thinks science will find a cure. But Evan knows he is not sick, he is transforming. Evan’s metamorphosis has him confined to his bed, constantly terrified, and completely alone. Alone, except for his visits from the Wuftoom, a wormlike creature that tells him he is becoming one of them.

Clinging to his humanity and desperate to help his overworked single mother, Evan makes a bargain with the Vitflys, the sworn enemies of the Wuftoom. But when the bargain becomes blackmail and the Vitflys prepare for war, whom can Evan trust? Is saving his humanity worth destroying an entire species, and the only family he has left?

Want to win your own, signed, hot-off-the-presses copy of Wuftoom? To enter: Leave a comment on this post, and make sure you include your email address in the appropriate field (don’t worry, we will NOT make your email address public).

Rules:

*Ends April 18, 2012, 11:59 p.m. EDT.

*You must be 13 or older to participate.

*You must have a US mailing address.

*Winner will be chosen at random from those who commented and notified by email.

Photo courtesy Clarion

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The year 2011 was hyped by many as the year mermaids would dethrone vampires as the reigning monarchy of YA paranormal fiction. USA Today proclaimed mermaids were going to be the next big thing and even mentioned the vampire queen herself, Stephenie Meyer, was working on her own spin of the mermaid genre.

So, where are all the mermaids? While there was a school of mermaid YA titles published in 2011 and a small herd swimming to bookstores in 2012, I have yet to see the genre live up to the hype. Publishers seem to be focusing their attentions on the tried and true, vampires, ghosts, and angels, when it comes to paranormal YA fiction.  A quick look at Barnes & Noble’s list of the top selling paranormal YA novels reveals that vampires still dominate. In fact, I was unable to find a single mermaid novel on the entire list. Over in fantasy, dystopian novels like The Hunger Games and tales involving the supernatural or high fantasy such as Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series are the bestsellers, with mermaids nowhere to be found.

Are readers not ready to give up their beloved vampires? Or is the market just not delivering the goods? There are plenty of readers who love a good mermaid tail* (the year 2011 saw the introduction of a magazine and convention devoted to mermaids), but it’s still a small niche. Perhaps publishing houses are finding it difficult to widen the appeal of mermaids or maybe YA readers just aren’t that into tales from the sea.

While I would welcome a change from the blood suckers that currently rule the YA roost, I’m not convinced mermaids are what’s next. To me, mermaids seem a little too fantastical for today’s YA readers. Maybe when the Disney-fied mental image most YA readers probably conjure up at the mention of mermaids loses its impact, readers will be able to take the genre more seriously. Vampires have had centuries to develop their cool, from Bram Stoker’s iconic Count Dracula to Anne Rice’s genre-busting Interview With A Vampire.  So, until then, I can’t agree that mermaids are the new vampire, but they are definitely washing up on shore**** more often. In an interview with Susan Marston of the Junior Library Guild, she mentions that novels featuring half-mermaids will be a popular trend for 2012. And a half-mermaid is nothing to shake your trident at, right?

*Pun very much intended. I’ll try to scale** back on punning from now on.

**Get it? Alright, alright. Starting now, I promise: fin*** to bad puns.

*** Okay, starting now.

**** Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Bio: Jean-Paul Bass recently decided to quit her job to focus on writing full-time and she swears she doesn’t miss having a regular paycheck at all.  She is currently working on her M.F.A. in fiction at The New School and is writing a memoir about growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.   

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When I heard that this month’s assignment was to write about our favorite groundbreaking female author, I knew I had to write about Anne McCaffrey, the fantasy pioneer who paved the way for so many of the rest of us female authors. Unfortunately, she passed away last year on November 21 at the age of 85. I don’t know if McCaffrey really considered herself a YA author, but I first discovered her books in my middle school library, and they immediately drew me in. The first book I read was Dragonflight, which was about a plucky woman who was really good at something. That may not sound all that extraordinary to people now who’ve grown up reading fantasy, especially when the The Hunger Games is about the biggest thing going, but at the time, it seemed like a really awesome twist. A woman who was the star of a fantasy book! And her story was about how she was better than the men at something, not about how she could find a man to love her. I ate up a bunch more of the books in the Dragonriders of Pern Series, and then I moved on to Crystal Singer. That series was about a plucky woman, too, someone who had the courage to travel far away from home and work under dangerous conditions.

There was no room for weak and fragile ninnies in Anne McCaffrey’s world! To me, a physically weak and fragile person who was nevertheless determined not to be a ninny, these books were an important validation of the idea that I could be good at something, and that that could matter more than anything else. I haven’t had a chance to go back and read McCaffrey’s books over again to see if I’d still feel the magic today that I felt when I read them back in middle school, but I’m not sure that I want to. I want to remember how I felt back then when I discovered something that I found wonderfully imaginative and inspiring. McCaffrey’s heroines were often born with amazing abilities, but they always had to work hard to achieve their goals, to do something with what they’d been given. That’s a theme that works great for driving an absorbing novel, but also a theme that I can still keep in mind in the context of my real life. So thanks, Ms. McCaffrey, for being a pioneer, thrashing your way over the same ground we young authors humbly attempt to walk on. I would say “you will be missed,” but since your books will be around forever, there’s no need. Let me say this: Thanks, we owe you.

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Shaw. Professor Shaw.

That’s my new title. Okay, well technically my title is Assistant Professor Shaw, but Professor sounds so much cooler. I can finally thank The New School for that master’s degree — that $40k piece of paper that hangs on my freshly painted bedroom walls. It feels good.

I’ve known for many years now that I wanted to teach. That’s half of the reason I decided to go to The New School (the other half was to improve my writing so that I could get an agent and get published. Ahem … Earth to agents. This is for you. Ahem!), so it’s nice to know that I am finally teaching.

Where: The College of New Rochelle.

What: Writing 102: Critical Research Essay

When: Why am I telling you this? So you show up and slaughter me on my way to class?

It’s a required freshman writing course geared towards showing students how to write a well-developed research paper.

Typically, the thought of writing is one that makes students want to scream. So you could imagine what writing a research paper must do to them. That’s why I’ve decided to take a mass media/pop culture spin on the proceedings.

What do Facebook, Britney Spears, Suzanne Collins, South Park, Saved by the Bell, Modern Family, People Magazine, The New York Times, Drake, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, Don Henley, Chuck Klosterman, Dove, United Colours of Benetton, and many, many more pop culture references have in common?

They’re all a part of my class.

Example: On the second day of class, we listened to a few songs about fame and media influence, like Drake’s “Headlines” and Lady Gaga’s “The Fame.” My first essay assignment had my students compare Britney Spears’s “Piece of Me” to Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” and discuss what each says about the media’s influence. I’m also having them read Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games because of what it says about our reality TV-obsessed culture. (Does anyone think Hunger Games is basically one giant commentary on Britney’s head-shaving, paparazzi-umbrella-attacking breakdown?)

Not your typical run-of-the-mill writing course, eh?

Exactly.

It’s weird being on the other side of the red pen. But it’s natural. I come alive during class time, and I live to create assignments. My goal is to foster a fun learning environment that provokes discussions that ignites my students’ creativity, hopefully gives them ideas for their writing, and helps them dive deeper into their own thoughts. Last week, I had them read a study on online gender-swapping. Then I had them use Facebook to study a member of the opposite sex and write a few paragraphs on gender construction.

I’m employing everything I’ve learned in my career as a writing student (and that of a writing tutor) to kick ass as Professor Shaw.

We’re entering the fourth week of classes, and so far I have a wonderful group of students who really seem to respond to the material. We have our first writing workshop on Monday.

Stay tuned for more stories and lessons from The Other Side of the Red Pen as they develop!

Photo Credit: The Daily News and New York Post

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During my first semester at The New School, I found out that there would be no young adult or children’s literature class offered in the spring semester. Of my first year. My reaction: “Uhh … what?!” Being that I was going for my masters in Writing for Children, I kinda, sorta, maybe figured that the program would offer us, oh, I don’t know, enough courses for us to be properly educated in the world of children’s lit.

Nope. I was thrust into a shark tank of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writers. The snobbiest of writers exist within those three disciplines. So how was I going to pick which literature course to take? They all sounded like snoozefests. Until I saw the “Writing in Vernacular” (I think that’s what the course was called) description. The booklist was intriguing and exciting. I figured, “Hey, if I have to take a course outside of my discipline, I guess this will have to do.”

I’m glad I did.

One of the main lessons we were taught was the notion of “authenticity.” What makes you believe the words on the page? If you were reading a book like Push by Sapphire and you found out at the end that Sapphire was a sixty-year-old white man who grew up in Beverly Hills, would that make you question the voice and, ultimately, the raw believability of the entire novel?

We see a lot of white characters written by black writers, but somehow we never question when that happens. One immediate example that comes to mind is fellow New School alum Nick Burd’s The Vast Fields of Ordinary. Protagonist Dade Hamilton is white. Author Nick Burd is not. Yet, there is not one moment in that book where I question the authenticity of Burd’s writing. Not one. Why is this? I often seek the answer to this, but I can’t seem to figure it out. Is it because “white culture” is oversaturated in our popular culture, from musicians on the radio to certain “spotlight” actors and Hollywood plotlines, to billboards and commercials and more? Had the roles been switched and a white author was writing about the experience of a black character, well, I don’t know; I’d be hesitant to believe it.

Maybe it’s because, as showed to us in that class on vernacular, there really aren’t books out there where the main character is black and the author is white. Not any good books, anyway.

I could ponder this and question the motives of publishing houses everywhere, but I still don’t have an agent or an editor, and I’d like to not alienate them quite yet. But I want to know: why do so many black writers write white? Is it because publishers think that only books with white protagonists sell? Is there less of a market for the Coe Booths of the world? I don’t know. I can only explain my attitude towards writing about an ethnicity that’s not my own.

My thoughts: I can’t possibly describe something that I haven’t lived. Sure, I’ve never lived in a fairy tale-esque world, nor have I lived in space, but neither has anyone else, so there’s nothing to compare my words to that exists in the tangible real world. I would feel like I’m assuming, based on what I know from my friends, what being a part of a black/Hispanic/Arabic/Asian/etc. family is like. And that’s not good enough for me.

The professor of my class, Bob Antoni, generally writes his books from the perspectives of black women from Trinidad. He’s white. But what made the difference for me, what made me cross the line from questioning his authenticity to believing him as someone who could genuinely depict an accurate portrayal of the life of a Trinny woman, was hearing his life story. He grew up in Trinidad. He knows that culture like—wait for the cliché—the back of his hand. When he read his writing, he spoke in a Trinidadian accent. When I closed my eyes, I never would have thought the man sitting feet away from me was white.

So what are “black” and “white”? I’ve always said that neither matters. Like the incomparable MJ once said, “If you’re thinkin’ about my baby/It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” And skin color has never meant anything more to me then just that: skin. But when I think about writing from the point of view of a black character, it’s not that simple. I think: “I can’t possibly write an accurate portrayal.” Would a book with a black protagonist be a beacon of truth to the black community? I’m going to say no. Maybe I’m just operating with preconceived notions of what “authentic” means. I don’t know.

Ultimately, I do believe it’s an authenticity issue. For me, at least, it is. But then again, I’m only generalizing white authors. What about all of the black authors? Where are all the books with black protagonists? That’s what I’d love to see. I think that for writers to accurately write about black characters there needs to first be an increase in black writers writing about black characters.

What do you all think?

Photo Credit: BaazarVoice.com

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