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Guest Author JOAN STEINAU LESTER showcase and giveaway ENDED

 May 10, 2013  3 Comments on Guest Author JOAN STEINAU LESTER showcase and giveaway ENDED

We have a very esteemed and award winning guest today.  So without further ado, welcome Dr. Joan Steinau Lester!!

JOAN STEINAU LESTER
Dr. Joan Steinau Lester is an award-winning commentator and author of four critically acclaimed books: Eleanor Holmes Norton: Fire In My Soul; The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas; Taking Charge: Every Woman’s Action Guide; and her first novel, Black, White, Other: The Search For Nina Armstrong.   She has won the NLGJA Seigenthaler Award in journalism and the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Finalist Award. Taking Charge was nominated as a Best Women’s Book by the SanFrancisco Women’s Heritage Museum and Mama’s Child was a Bellwether Prize finalist.
After receiving her doctorate in multicultural education, Dr. Lester served as the Executive Director of the Equity Institute, which pioneered the diversity wave of the ’80s and ’90s, for sixteen years.
As a member of a biracial family, Lester’s lifelong passion has been writing
about issues of racial identity. Her former husband and father of her children was black; she has been with a female partner/spouse for over thirty years.  Lester’s writing has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including Essence, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, and Cosmopolitan. She lives in Northern California.

Connect with Dr. Lester at these sites:

http://www.joanlester.com/index.htm     https://www.facebook.com/joan.s.lester     https://twitter.com/joan_lester

GUEST POST

Being a fulltime writer is a strange occupation. I work all day alone in a tiny cottage behind my house, hunched over my computer, lost in an imaginary world. If I weren’t producing coherent literature, some might consider this behavior peculiar, at best–or worthy of psychiatric intervention.

Even at night my characters follow me, so real are they. I hear their voices, worry over their troubles, wish they hadn’t decided to do that.  “Oh no,” I want to warn, while I grit my teeth and let them have their way.

Odder yet, I’m always maintaining a dual perspective, for at the same time I feel enmeshed with my fictional people (“Ruby, please call home!”) I am simultaneously aware of my role as their creator, and consumed by technical issues. Take verb choices, for instance: which one will give the most accurate and vivid picture of my characters’ reality? Does Solomon, the father in my novel Mama’s Child, stride into a room, lope, or guiltily sidle in, after he misses an urgent parent meeting with the head of his daughter Ruby’s school?

Yet despite my sometimes sleepless nights as I mull over the best possible word to describe my character’s behavior–words in harmony with the kind of person he is–I love the solitary life, creating worlds over which I have total control.

And then, another oddity of the writing life occurs, if one is successful: after years of happily laboring alone, growing intimately acquainted with my characters’ lives over a span of time (in Mama’s Child we watch the family fracture and reassemble over forty years), then, suddenly, it’s publication day! Now a whole big world comes tumbling in. Reviewers, readers, interviewers–everyone has a response, everyone wants their say. My private imaginary world is suddenly a public one.

Even as I’m thrilled to hear others’ enthusiasm for Elizabeth, Solomon, Ruby, and Che, my characters in Mama’s Child, I mourn that quiet period when they were my creatures alone. Like a parent whose child is growing up, leaving home, I have to say Good-bye, knowing that I have done my absolute best to prepare her for the world, and let her go.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK
A stunning tale about the deeply entrenched conflicts between a white mother and her biracial daughter.
Mama’s Child is story of an idealistic young white woman who traveled to the American South as a civil rights worker, fell in love with an African American man, and started a family in San Francisco, where the more liberal city embraced them—except when it didn’t. They raise a son and daughter, but the tensions surrounding them have a negative impact on their marriage, and they divorce when their children are still young. For their biracial daughter, this split further destabilizes her already challenged sense of self—“Am I black or white?” she must ask herself, “Where do I belong?” Is she her father’s daughter alone?
As the years pass, the chasm between them widens, even as the mother attempts to hold on to the emotional chord that binds them. It isn’t until the daughter, Ruby, herself becomes a wife and mother that she begins to develop compassion and understanding for the many ways that her own mother’s love transcended race and questions of identity.
BOOK DETAILS:

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Atria Books; Original edition (May 7, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451693184
ISBN-13: 978-1451693188

PURCHASE LINKS:

           

THANKS TO SAMANTHA AT JKS COMMUNICATIONS,
I HAVE ONE (1) COPY TO GIVE AWAY.
OPEN TO U.S. RESIDENTS
FILL OUT RAFFLECOPTER ENTRY FORM BELOW
GIVEAWAY ENDS MAY 24th AT 6PM EST

WINNER WILL BE CHOSEN BY RAFFLECOPTER AND NOTIFIED
VIA EMAIL AND WILL HAVE 48 HOURS TO RESPOND
OR ANOTHER NAME WILL BE CHOSEN

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YOUR JAVA SCRIPT MAY NEED TO BE UPDATED
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DISCLAIMER
I received a copy of this book, at no charge to me, in exchange for my honest review. No items that I receive are ever sold…they are kept by me, or given to family and/or friends.
ADDENDUM
I do not have any affiliation with Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. I am an IndieBound affiliate. I am providing link(s) solely for visitors that may be interested in purchasing this Book/EBook.

 

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