Tracy Price-Thompson | |
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| Born | 1963 (age 59–60) Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Rutgers University |
Tracy Price-Thompson (born 1963) is an American speaker, novelist, editor, and retired United States Army Engineer Officer. She is a decorated veteran of the Gulf War.
Tracy Price-Thompson was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of NoireMagazine.com, and a former book reviewer for QBR: The Quarterly Black Review . She holds an undergraduate degree in business, and a master's degree in social work. She is a Ralph Bunche graduate Fellow at Rutgers University.
She is the CEO of Versatile Voices Entertainment Group and a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Price-Thompson self-published her first novel, Black Coffee, at the age of 37. It was quickly bought by Random House [1] imprint, Striver's Row, as part of an unprecedented three-book, six-figure deal, [2] and became a bestseller.
She has since published five other novels: Chocolate Sangria, [3] A Woman's Worth, Knockin' Boots, Gather Together in My Name [4] and 1-900-A-N-Y-T-I-M-E.
Price-Thompson's novel, A Woman's Worth, which illuminated the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa, won the 2005 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award [5] [6] for Contemporary Fiction.
Price-Thompson went on to publish another weighty, socially conscious novel in Gather Together in My Name, which highlighted racial profiling, prosecutorial corruption, and the disproportionate application of the death penalty for minorities in the criminal justice system.
Price-Thompson's short memoir, "Bensonhurst: Black and Then Blue", published in Simon & Schuster [7] ’s anthology series Children of the Dream: Our Stories of Growing Up Black in America, describes her experiences as a young black child helping to integrate the public schools of New York City. The work is encapsulated in the Library of The National Humanities Center in The Making of African American Identity Volume III under the theme "Overcome?" [8]
Price-Thompson's non-fiction credits also include:
Price-Thompson has edited three anthologies of fiction including, Proverbs for the People, published by Kensington Publishers, which was the first major collection of Black fiction since Terry McMillan's Breaking Ice.
She also edited and contributed to two volumes in the Sister4Sister Empowerment Series: Other People's Skin, [10] with stories that sought to acknowledge, examine, and heal the "skin/hair thang" between Black women; and My Blue Suede Shoes, which empowered victims of domestic violence to walk away from abusive environments. Price-Thompson's title story in the collection Other People's Skin, also won a Hurston/Wright Award for short fiction.
Her short fiction credits include:
Price-Thompson wrote and produced the stage play Colored Girls, adapted from the choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange.
Her keynote speeches include "On Writing" at the Claude Brown Writing Workshop in Washington, DC, and "The Niagara Project" in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Price-Thompson served as a judge on the 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Panel.
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first Afrо-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. It is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston's best known work. The novel explores protagonist Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny".
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards program honors Black writers in the United States and around the globe for literary achievement. Introduced in 2001, the Legacy Award was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers. It is granted for fiction, nonfiction and poetry, selected in a juried competition.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern a second novel, Song of the Shank, and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories”. He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son”.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American writer, best known for her debut novel Wench: A Novel (2010), which became a bestseller.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage. Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is an American poet, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist, whose writing often focuses on culture and travel in the African diaspora. She has been the recipient of several awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society. Her novels include The River Where Blood is Born (1997), which won the American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Best Fiction, and Hot Johnny , which was an Essence magazine bestseller in hardcover fiction. She has also taught literature and creative writing at educational institutions internationally, including at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, the Writer's Studio at the University of Chicago, the North Country Institute for Writers of Color, the Hurston-Wright Writers Workshop, and Chicago State University.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an African-American writer. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, won the Los Angeles Times Art Sidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Award for fiction
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation is an American literary nonprofit organization that supports the development and careers of Black writers. The Foundation provides classes, workshops, an annual conference, and offers the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the North Star Award, among others. Writer Marita Golden and cultural historian Clyde McElvene founded the organization in 1990.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Lady Rushdie is an American poet, novelist, photographer and visual artist, who is the author of five published collections of poems. In her most recent book, Seeing the Body (2020), she "pairs poetry with photography, exploring memory, Black womanhood, the American landscape, and rebirth." It was a nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry. Griffiths, who also has a novel forthcoming, lives in New York City.
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