Lucille Clifton's death and blogger's novel as movie tops weekly round-up

Photo by Mark Lennihan/Associated
Press. Lucille Clifton accepting a
National Book Award in 2000.

This week's black books in blogs round-up begins with the Carleen Brice story. Bloggers are talking about their fellow blogger whose novel Orange Mint and Honey has become Sins of the Mother, a Lifetime Movie Network movie that airs Sunday night at 8:00 p.m. EST. The African-American Books Examiner covered the news Thursday.

At the same time, writers and poets mourn the death of famous African-American poet Lucille Clifton.

1.)  Here's a Carleen Brice piece at BlogHer.com, Blogger's Writing Dreams Come True, which mentions the blog Dear Thursday where the blogger discusses Orange Mint and Honey, which she made sure to read before the movie airs. Dear Thursday also lists writing lessons learned from the book.

In addition, the following bloggers also discuss Brice's book and the movie's premiere:

• Motherhood interviews Brice
• Maggie Marr reminds readers that they should know Brice.
• Carleen Brice herself writes how her book-to-movie deal all came to be as a guest at Defenders Online (It's a good read.)
  

  Writing a novel isn’t digging ditches or picking cotton, but it’s hard. And it tests your spirit all day almost every day. Will I get an agent? Will I get a publisher? And if I do, will people like what I write? Hell, will anyone else ever read it or will it turn out that I’ve only been talking to myself?

• Simply Fred Smith
• Gwyneth Bolton

2.)  At Color Online the blogger posted a poem by Lucille Clifton. The renowned poet died Saturday, February 13. Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who wrote President Barack Obama's inaugural poem and recited it at the inauguration, wrote an excellent piece on Clifton for The New Yorker, "Remembering Lucille Clifton." Also, poet Evie Shockley at Red Room, among others, remembers Clifton.

3.)  Virginia DeBerry of the writing team DeBerry and Grant posted a guest column at LitChat.net on the "Legacy of African-American Writers."

4.)  Onika Pascal at Collections of a See Through Soul posted an interview with the author of Sugar, Bernice McFadden. It's worth a read.

5.)  Dreamer Girl at Dreamer's Paradise reminds some of and introduces others to Ann Petry and says Petry was the first black woman author to sell more than one million copies of a book. She says Petry's novel The Street, published 1946, is her favorite book of all time. Petry's novel is also considered to be "one of the first novels to address black women's experiences in terms of race, class, and gender," per her bio at the College of Charleston.

If you are a blogger who focuses on books by and about African-Americans and would like to be considered for inclusion in the weekly round-up, feel free to leave a link to your blog in comments or send them to the African-American Books Examiner here. You are also invited to subscribe. If you leave a URL link, do not include the "http://" or the "www" and it should be accepted by the commenting interface.

If you blog about books, writing, or the publishing industry in general or simply love to read and have book recommendations, the African-American Books Examiner would also appreciate hearing news or commentary from you.