UNITED STATES AUTHOR · BLACK KIDS · FICTION
Jess Mowry
Jess Mowry (born March 27, 1960, near Starkville, Mississippi) is an American author of books and stories for children and young adults. He has written eighteen books and many short stories for and about black children and teens in a variety of genres, ranging from inner-city settings to the forests of Haiti. Many of the novels are set in Oakland, California (USA), and deal with contemporary themes such as crack cocaine, drug dealers, teenage sexuality, school dropouts, and coming-of-age.
"DOWN!” yelled Bilal, spotting the gun as a minivan skidded around the corner, its ass-end clipping a bag-lady's cart, scattering cans and junk everywhere.
— from The Bridge
Most acclaimed
Rats In The Trees
1993
Rats In The Trees was Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories of many street kids, though most about Robby, a 13-year-old boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone in the city, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. The stories were originally "told stories" in what some might call an oral tradition, to entertain and offer positive messages to kids at a West Oakland youth center where Mowry worked at the time; and when he began to write them down he tried keep that flavor. Rats portrays the conditions for inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George Bush's (King George The First) "kinder, gentler America" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods, as if designed for that, and especially to destroy kids. The times of happy black music of the late 1970s were ending. So was the social-awareness and the kinship of Brotherhood which had bonded, strengthened and sustained black people during the '60s and early 70s. The break-dance era was over, and the brutal and desperate years of gangstuh rap, of self-hatred fostering black-on-black crime, and "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" were beginning as if in retaliation for that brief interlude of relative peace. Robby and The Animals were old enough to remember the happier days when black people seemed united in a common cause of freedom and justice; and like most black kids at the time they knew they were losing something even if they might not have been able to give it a name. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true, the ever-increasing and senseless black-on-black crime, the "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" in U.S. innercities, kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. It was also predicted in Rats that guns, gangs, drugs and violence would move into white suburbia -- as Chuck (an older white teenager in Rats) said: "Coming soon to a neighborhood near YOU!" Of course, much of the language and many of the expressions, as well as some attitudes toward certain types of people, have changed since 1989 -- or are at least masked by political-correctness these days -- but judge for yourself if the U.S. has gotten kinder, gentler or any more enlightened since then despite all the political-correctness and Pollyanna lip-service given to equality. Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S. The Amazon Kindle Special Edition includes an extra story not available in the print editions, which was cut from the original small-press edition because of concern for length and printing costs.
Children of the Night
1997
In 1969, Little, Brown and Company published The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, edited by Langston Hughes - the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1897 to 1967. Now, a quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor has compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, bringing this extraordinary series up to date. Gathering together the most gifted black writers of our time - from 1967 to the present - Naylor has assembled a rich and varied collection of stories. The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Naylor has arranged the stories thematically so the reader focuses on a particular subject - slavery, for example, or the family. In the hands of different writers, these themes provide a wealth and variety of human experience. The stories are more than testimonies of the long battle for survival. From a young woman's struggles with her barren faith in Alice Walker's lyrical "The Diary of an African Nun" to an innocent man's involvement in a horrifying act of violence in Ann Petry's "The Witness," they are, as Naylor states in her introduction, "examples of affirmation: of memory, of history, of family, of being." They are stories for all of us "at the beginning: of mankind as a species; of America as a nation; of the African-American as a full citizen."
The Bridge
The Bridge is a charming, learned and unique gem of a book by the author of the international bestseller In Europe...Istanbul's Galata Bridge has spanned the Golden Horn since the sixth century AD, connecting the old city with the more Western districts to the north. But the bridge is a city in itself, peopled by merchants and petty thieves, tourists and fishermen, and at the same time a microcosmic reflection of Turkey as the link between Asia and Europe. Geert Mak introduces us to the woman who sells lottery tickets, the cigarette vendors and the best pickpockets in Europe. He tells us about the pride of the cobbler and the tea-seller's homesickness. And he describes the role of honour in Turkish culture, the temptations of fundamentalism and violence, and the urge to survive, even in the face of despair. These stories of the bridge's denizens are interwoven with vignettes illuminating moments in the history of Istanbul and Turkey and shedding light on Turkey's relationship with Europe and the West, the Armenian question, the migration from the Turkish countryside to the city and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The Bridge is a charming, learned and unique gem of a book by the author of the international bestseller In Europe.