This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Lolita Files | |
---|---|
Born | Fort Lauderdale, Florida, U.S. |
Nationality | American |
Education | University of Florida (BS) |
Occupations | |
Years active | 1997–present |
Website | www |
Lolita Files is an American author, [1] [2] [3] screenwriter, and producer. [4] Among her six bestselling novels are book club favorites Scenes from a Sistah [5] and Child of God. [6] Her sixth novel, sex.lies.murder.fame [7] was optioned for film by Carolyn Folks for Entertainment Studios [8] with Files adapting the screenplay.
The book Once Upon A Time In Compton, by former Compton Gang Unit Detectives Timothy M. Brennan and Robert Ladd, along with Files, about Brennan and Ladd's years in the gang unit, the rise of Gangsta rap, gang wars, the L.A. riots, the investigations of the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., and the fall of the Compton Police Department was published on April 25, 2017.
Files has a degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Florida and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Files lives in Los Angeles, where she writes novels, nonfiction, and writes and produces projects for television, film, and new media.
Lolita Files was born in Fort Lauderdale, FL, to Lillie (née Brackett) (d. 2008) and Arthur James Files, Sr. (d. 1999), She was named by her mother after the Stanley Kubrick film Lolita. She has one older sibling, Arthur James Files, Jr.
An avid reader from an early age, she was heavily immersed in mythology (Greek mythology, Roman mythology, Norse mythology, Arthurian legend), Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Her love of Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Meriwether, Vladimir Nabokov, Chinua Achebe, Claude Brown, Richard Wright, Gustav Flaubert, and Greek playwrights Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes would inform and influence much of her work.
Files graduated from Dillard High School with seven scholarships and attended the University of Florida at Gainesville. She briefly worked as a stringer for the student newspaper, The Independent Florida Alligator, was a member of the University of Florida Gospel Choir, [9] and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority (Iota Lambda chapter). [10] In her senior year, she was a Senator representing the College of Journalism and Communications [11] in UF's Student Senate. [12]
After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Broadcast Journalism, Files returned to Fort Lauderdale, working as a marketing manager for a pharmaceutical company and as a regional property coordinator for Great Atlantic Property Management, a real estate management company based out of Newport News, VA with commercial and residential properties that spanned the Eastern Seaboard and parts of the Midwest. Her experience with the world of property management would later inform her first two novels, Scenes from a Sistah (1997), and its followup, Getting To The Good Part [13] (1999).
From 1992 to 1996, Files was the National Communications Manager for the Facilities Management division of KinderCare Learning Centers, the nation's largest provider of for-profit child care and early childhood education, then based in Montgomery, AL.
In the fall of 1994, Files overnighted two comedic short stories and fifty pages of Child of God, a dramatic novel she'd been sporadically working on for five years, to literary agency Jay Garon-Brooke Associates, Inc., [14] the agency that represented bestselling author John Grisham. In her query letter, Files stated she had eight more short stories that went with the two she sent.
Nancy Coffey, an agent from Garon-Brooke, called the next morning requesting to see the rest of the material. A week later, Files was signed by the agency.
"Her voice just leapt off the page," Coffey told the Miami Herald. "It was fresh, uplifting and funny." [15]
After signing with Garon-Brooke, while working on completing Child of God, Files began writing another novel, Scenes from a Sistah, completing the first draft in seven days. In February 1996, Warner Books purchased Scenes for an advance of $50,000.
"It's a Cinderella story," says Caryn Karmatz Rudy, Files' editor at Warner Books. "Most often, you hear about people writing and getting a zillion rejections. But Lolita writes this book, sends it to the agency of the most successful writer in the country, and they take it. Then, we publish it. That's not your typical story." [16]
In April 1996, Files left Corporate America for a full-time career as a writer. Scenes from a Sistah debuted [17] a year later in April 1997 and was an instant hit, [18] [19] quickly selling out of its first printing and landing on several bestseller lists.
"Child of God" was published in September 2001, after the release of Scenes sequel Getting to the Good Part in 1999 and Blind Ambitions, in 2000.
The short stories that helped Files get signed by the Garon-Brooke literary agency were expanded into HodgePodge, a novel including several characters who feature prominently in the Scenes trilogy (Scenes from a Sistah,Getting to the Good Part, and Tastes Like Chicken). To-date, Files has not chosen to publish the book.
In 1998, Files appeared in the play "Sisters Who Get Everything Without Giving Up Anything" at the Homefront Theatre, [20] [21] playing lead character Rea Montgomery. [22]
SUNY Empire State College offers an eight-week course, "Exploring The Disciplines: Literature (EDU-232072)," [23] centered around the examination of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Lolita Files' novel, Child of God.
Per the course description:
"Both texts include a similar story-line: a murder, an incestuous relationship, an uneasy resolution at the end. By exploring these texts written over 300 years apart, students will learn about the types of themes, questions, comparisons and insights that literature has to offer."
Files produced and appears as an investigator for A&E's six-part limited series Who Killed Tupac? [24] In the series, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump leads an in-depth investigation into the unsolved murder of hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur.
In December 2012, Files took a genealogical DNA test through lineage tracing company African Ancestry. [25] Results came back revealing a direct link of Files' maternal ancestry [26] to the Brame and Balanta people of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa.
Once Upon A Time In Compton (Tim Brennan & Robert Ladd with Lolita Files) - Amazon, April 2017
Marion Hugh "Suge" Knight Jr. is an American record executive and convicted felon who is the co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records. Knight was a central figure in gangsta rap's commercial success in the 1990s. This feat is attributed to the record label's first two album releases: Dr. Dre's The Chronic in 1992 and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle in 1993. Knight is serving a 28-year sentence in prison for a fatal hit-and-run in 2015.
In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas.
Mary Higgins Clark was an American author of suspense novels. Each of her 51 books was a bestseller in the United States and various European countries, and all of her novels remained in print as of 2015, with her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, in its seventy-fifth printing.
Michael Joseph Connelly is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. Connelly is the bestselling author of 38 novels and one work of non-fiction, with over 74 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 40 languages. His first novel, The Black Echo, won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly's 1997 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of Connelly's novel The Lincoln Lawyer starred Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
Orlando Tive "Baby Lane" Anderson was an American gang member suspected in the murder of Tupac Shakur. Anderson belonged to the California-based gang known as the South Side Compton Crips. Detective Tim Brennan of the Compton Police Department filed an affidavit naming Anderson as a suspect; he denied involvement and was never charged. Anderson was shot and killed in an unrelated gang shootout at the age of 23 in 1998.
Lolita is an American 1962 black comedy-psychological drama film directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the eponymous 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The black-and-white film follows a middle-aged literature lecturer who writes as "Humbert Humbert" and has hebephilia. He is sexually infatuated with young, adolescent Dolores Haze. It stars James Mason as Humbert, Shelley Winters as Mrs. Haze, Peter Sellers as Quilty, and Sue Lyon as Lolita.
Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child, he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.
Penny Warner is an American mystery writer who has won multiple Agatha Awards. She has also written more than 50 books on subjects ranging from cooking to parenting guides to party and activity books.
Fool Moon is a 2001 contemporary fantasy novel by author Jim Butcher. It is the second novel in The Dresden Files, which follows the character of Harry Dresden, present-day Chicago's only advertising professional wizard.
Cathleen "Cathy" Scott is a Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling American true crime author and investigative journalist who penned the biographies and true crime books The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, both bestsellers in the United States and United Kingdom, and was the first to report Shakur's death. She grew up in La Mesa, California and later moved to Mission Beach, California, where she was a single parent to a son, Raymond Somers Jr. Her hip-hop books are based on the drive-by shootings that killed the rappers six months apart in the midst of what has been called the West Coast-East Coast war. Each book is dedicated to the rappers' mothers.
Tupac Assassination: Conspiracy or Revenge is a documentary film about the unsolved murder of rapper Tupac Shakur produced by Frank Alexander, a Shakur bodyguard who was with the rapper at the time of the shooting, produced and directed by Richard Bond.
What's His Name is a 1914 American comedy-drama film directed by Cecil B. DeMille. A 35mm print of this film exists in the George Eastman House film archive.
Brooke Christa Shields is an American actress. She was initially a child model and gained critical acclaim at age 12 for her leading role in Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby (1978). She continued to model into her late teenage years and starred in several dramas in the 1980s, including The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love (1981).
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov which addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator, a middle-aged French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old nymphet, Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
The Killing of Tupac Shakur is a biographical, true crime account by American journalist and author Cathy Scott of the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. The book made news upon its September 1997 release, on the first anniversary of Shakur's death, because of an autopsy photo included in its pages. It was the first book to be released covering the rapper's death. The book was reprinted in the UK by Plexus Publishing and in Poland by Kagra. Coverage of the autopsy photo, taken of Shakur's body on a gurney in the coroner's examining room, catapulted the book onto the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. New editions of the book were released in 2002 and 2014.
Clarence Arnold Elkins Sr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his mother-in-law, Judith Johnson, and the rape and assault of his wife's niece, Brooke Sutton. He was convicted solely on the basis of the testimony of his wife's six-year-old niece who testified that Elkins was the perpetrator.
Tupac Shakur, an American rapper, was fatally shot on September 7, 1996, in a drive-by shooting in the Las Vegas Valley, Nevada. He was 25 years old. The shooting occurred at 11:15 p.m. (PDT), when the car carrying Shakur was stopped at a red light at East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane.
Timothy M. Brennan and Robert Ladd joined the Compton Police Department as officers in 1982 and 1983, respectively. In 1988, they were promoted to become Compton's two-man gang unit. The police department could only afford to have two people at the time, even though many smaller cities typically had up to four times as many. As the gang unit, Brennan and Ladd were responsible for dealing with and investigating over fifty-five gangs in the 10.1 square mile area that make up the City of Compton. They have served as the primary or assisting investigating officers on hundreds of gang-related murders and thousands of gang-related shootings, and witnessed instances of gang-related rapes, robberies, drive-by shootings, and shootings at police officers.
Duane Keith "Keefe D" Davis is an American member of the California-based gang known as the South Side Compton Crips who is charged with first-degree murder in the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur.