Jabari Asim: Once when I was on a panel at the Baltimore Book Festival, a woman asked me if my wife had dreadlocks and a gap between her two front teeth. The woman seemed especially intrigued when I told her no. She had read a short story of mine that was published in Brown Sugar, Carol Taylor's collection of erotic black fiction. In the story, a man has an intimate encounter with a woman who has dreads and a gap. I told the woman she was confusing the narrator of the story with me ---and fiction with real-life. I'm not sure that I convinced her.
Steven Barnes: I had a reader tell me that my work had helped him survive chemotherapy. Wow.
Myles Pinkney and Sandra Pinkney: The best experience with a reader is one told to us during the Charlotte Zolotow award ceremony, in which we were told that when our book Shades of Black was read to a little girl, how she hugged it, and would not let it go.
Alexs Pate: There have been quite a few, but when Finding Makeba was published I got a letter from a young woman named Makeba who asked if I knew her father...who wondered if I was telling his story...and if I knew where he was. It was heart wrenching that that story could have had such a profound effect on someone.
Maryann Reid: Well, during a booksigning, a young woman began crying. She told me the situations in my book all happened to her and now she understands that maybe she was the problem. She said my book helped her take responsibility for her own mistakes and stop blaming every man who walked away from her. I was quite moved, as I did not think my book had that effect.
Marissa Monteilh: Last year, I received an email from a reader who after reading May December Souls, was moved to contact her estranged father after ten years. Realizing that my writing touched someone in that way was very inspiring and touching. Situations such as this further fuel my desire to create compelling stories.
Francis Ray: A lady emailed me to say she had found comfort in my books after her husband died some months earlier. She had no children and no family living close to her. She felt hopeless until she read my book. The heroine in a particular book had also lost her husband and had a difficult time adjusting initially. The reader saw similarities of herself in the heroine. Her email to me was thanks for giving her hope and lightening her heart. The email meant a great deal to me and encouraged me to continue to write about characters who triumph over adversity.
Mat Johnson: I got a letter from a woman in Seattle. She came from a totally different world from me, totally different background, and she really got my book, really felt it. That told me I was doing something right. I’ve kept it in my bag for months. I still haven’t written her back, the letter meant so much to me, I don’t no where to start.
My biggest surprise has been other black writers who’ve read my work and liked it, some who I specifically thought would hate it. Sonia Sanchez was given a copy of Drop and I was petrified. To me, growing up in Philly, she was a queen of the old school, she spoke at my high school graduation and I was in awe. Here I am now this smartass, sticking my tongue out at convention, lampooning the very neighborhood she’s lived in for 20 years. I was petrified that she had my book. It was like sending porno to your grandmother. But it turned out that she liked it. Who knew?
Michael Datcher: My most memorable encounter with a reader was simply at a reading, when a young man said that my book had changed his life.
Kim McLarin: I have had several people contact me via e-mail about my latest book, Meeting of the Waters. It's amazing to me that people would take the time to search out and contact someone because of the experience they've had in reading a book. One woman told me it kept her up all night, which floored me. I was thrilled and humbled.
Michele Andrea Bowen: A reader, who is a pastor's wife, wrote my aunt, who is a bishop's wife and talked about how deeply Church Folk touched her. She sent a letter to me, via my aunt. And in that letter, she said that whenever it got rough being a First Lady, she said the prayer that the character Essie Lane Simmons said, regarding her husband and role as a First Lady in the book.
Kayla Perrin: I just had a very memorable e-mail from a woman who told me she had stopped reading novels in grade 3. She said she had no desire to read, but just recently, someone gave her a copy of one of my books. She said she loved it, and that it brought the joy of reading back into her life (she's now a woman). She thanked me for that. It was very special. There are many more examples, and all make me feel a great sense of pride that my work is reaching people, helping them in times of difficulty.
Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant: We've been fortunate enough to hear from nearly 20,000 readers via email or snail mail since the release of both Tryin' to Sleep in the Bed You Made and Far From the Tree, not to mention those we've met as we've toured the country. So many of those encounters are memorable it's hard to single out one. We had a reader who wrote to us from a shelter where she was living with her three children. She had decided that the only way her abusive relationship was going to stop was if she did something about it. TRYIN' made her want to take responsibility for making her life better.
Tonya Bolden: I've had so many memorable encounters with readers over the years, from the collages students at the Louis Armstrong School in Queens made around my novel Just Family, to the drawings around my book about Carter G. Woodson created by children in Columbus, Georgia. And I'll never forget the 5th grader in a Bronx school who told me that the reason he'd recommend And Not Afraid to Dare to other young people was so they could know that there are great black people other than Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King.
Natasha Tarpley: I have so many wonderful encounters with readers. People are always telling me about the ways they connect with my work and how proud they are of me. In fact, I've met many surrogate parents and grandparents throughout the years who have claimed me as a daughter. I also meet a lot of amazing kids, who are just so creative and smart. They inspire me! One of my most memorable experiences was at a school where I was participating in a volunteer program specifically geared toward authors of children's literature. I met a little girl there who was so soft-spoken, you had to literally put your ear to her mouth to hear what she was saying. She was very shy, as you can imagine. But she was a fabulous writer! As third grader, she had already written "books," notebooks that she'd filled with stories she had written. She told me that she had to hide her notebooks under her pillow, or else her brother and sister would find them and rip them up. Although it was heartbreaking to hear about the destructive circumstances in which she lived, it was so inspiring to see a little girl, who at such a young age, was already so committed to her work, that she went to extraordinary measures to produce and protect it. I tried to keep in contact with her after my residency at the school ended, but she moved away. I hope she's still writing. I believe in my heart that she is.
At that same school, in another third grade class, there was a little boy who was very hyperactive and disruptive. The teacher usually had him sit by himself and he didn't participate in the class. But this little boy loved to make things, robots in particular. He'd sit at his desk and create these wonderful creatures by drawing or cutting them out of paper. One day, I brought him a copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon, about a little boy who creates his own world with a crayon. And he loved it! He sat quietly and read for the whole class, and then told me how much he liked it. That moment was so exciting, for I got to see first hand how books can impact someone's life.
Phyllis Y. Harris: When making reservations for my tour, I met a lovely woman who worked with the airline, and she took great care of me. We talked about my profession, and I told her I was a writer. She wanted to know what book I had written and said she wanted a copy. I sent her a copy of the book, and a few weeks later she wrote me a beautiful letter telling me how lovely the book was and how many people she had shared it with. They, too, thought it was a good read. She promised me that Oprah would recognize how great the book was too, and select it for her book club. That has not happened, but I'm still quite optimistic!
Monique Morris: A youth (high school student) sent me an e-mail and told me that my book helped to open her eyes to the many systems that contribute to the dilapidation of her community. It was a moving and beautiful experience to know that I touched at least one person so personally.
Raymond A. Winbush: What has been absolutely heartwarming is to get e-mails and/or phone calls from parents, fathers, husbands and wives about how my book The Warrior Method changed them or caused them to reflect on some childhood incident that really moved them. I had tears in my eyes just today from a father who had read my book and related to me at length of how the only time he could talk to his father was when his Dad drove him to and from school. He talked about the pain he experienced when a white teacher who taught at the same school offered to drive him since they were going to the same place, and how these precious drives ended with a sense of loss and increased the gulf between he and his father.
Because I shared my own life's story in the book, it amazes me how persons during Q & A periods after my readings will ask something about my family. I'm always surprised about "what" touches a reader as well. One sentence from what you have written may touch a chord that is deeply embedded in the soul of a reader even though you may not have meant it to be interpreted the way it was written. This is why putting words on paper is a sacred responsibility for me as a black author; words have power far beyond what you may have attributed to them when you first wrote them.
