Entries Tagged 'Arts and Entertainment' ↓

Victoria Rowell, best known as Druscilla Winters on CBS’s daytime series “The Young and the Restless,” first penned her memoir, The Women Who Raised Me, last year. It went on to become a best-seller and won many awards. We first featured her here in March, where we talked briefly about her background as a foster child and an actress.

Now the paperback and audio versions of The Women Who Raised Me are available at bookstores everywhere. And if you order them from Victoria Rowell’s website (see below for addresses), you can get her to send you an autographed copy. Victoria Rowell is fast becoming a writing powerhouse, with more books and even a novel on the way! Read on for all the juicy details.

Connie Briscoe: Your memoir, The Women Who Raised Me, received widespread recognition in the literary community and hit the major bestseller lists including the New York Times and Essence magazine. Do you have plans to do more writing in the future? If so, what kind of book might that be? Fiction, nonfiction, more memoirs?

Victoria Rowell: Yes, I plan on writing two companion books—The Men Who Raised Me and The Perfectly Imperfect Inheritance. Currently I am working on a novel, which will be my next book, Secrets of a Soap Opera Diva. I am also happy to announce that the audio book version of The Women Who Raised Me is complete, which is read by me and went on sale May 1, so please log on to www.victoriarowell.com and get your copy. It’s a great Mother’s Day gift!

CB: It sounds perfect for Mother’s Day. Was writing what you thought it would be? In other words, was it harder or easier than you had imagined to open up and put your thoughts and feelings on paper?

Victoria Rowell: Actually this was the hardest thing I have done in my career. Ballet was hard, but writing has been the hardest because of the solitude nature. Revisiting people in my life was also a challenge. I can say it was really joyous and painful at same time.

CB: What time of day did you do most of your writing and what was your favorite writing spot. Why do you think that was?

Victoria Rowell: Morning time. For The Women Who Raised Me (hardback), I was really under a tight schedule. I had a serious deadline to meet so I would get up around 4:00 a.m. and write prior to going to the CBS set for The Young and the Restless tapings. By nature, I am a morning writer.

CB: What were you trying to accomplish by writing your memoir? Who were you hoping to reach?

Victoria Rowell: The purpose of writing my memoir is to thank all of the extraordinary women throughout the country for sharing their lives. I wanted to share the fact that too often our mentors do not get enough recognition. I also wanted to shine light on the ordinary people doing extraordinary things…the millions of mothers and mentors who go unheralded. I want The Women Who Raised Me to be a call to action so I have listed resources in the back of the book. Anyone who is willing can be a mentor, a volunteer or foster parent if your heart and mind are in the right place. Connie, I really think we achieved that in the hardcover, which, as you stated, is a New York Times and Essence magazine bestseller! For more information on my book, you can visit www.thewomenwhoraisedme.com.

CB: My children were adopted out of foster care at ages 6 and 8, so I’m well aware of how important good foster care homes are. What is the message about foster care that you hope we get from The Women Who Raised Me and your work supporting foster children.

Victoria Rowell: I want all to be aware of the fact that 98% of foster parents are doing a great job! Unfortunately, the media tends to write about very discouraging stories. It is very important that I write about the majority. My ambition is to smash this myth that all foster parents are not doing their job, when it’s really only about 2%.

CB: Thanks for doing that. It’s so important. What’s next for you in film? Anything in the works?

Continue reading →

The granddaddy of book expos, BookExpo America (BEA) is the largest annual book trade fair in the United States. Last year more than 37,000 people attended BEA from over 80 countries, including librarians, booksellers, authors, agents, editors, educators and others. This year BEA will be held in Los Angeles from May 29 to June 1 and as usual many major publishers will have booths and exhibits.

According to BookExpo America, the Exhibition Hall will include more than 2,000 companies from around the world showcasing products and services in the following categories—

• African American—now in its fifth year, the African American Pavilion at BEA is the marketplace for thousands of African American publishing industry professionals
• Children’s Books—hundreds of books and publishers covering the entire span of young adult publishing and its products
• Education Connection—books and products for children, schools and children’s libraries
• Independent Publishers—drop in and find yourself engaged with editors, publishers and other progressive leaders of this robust arm of the publishing industry
• International Rights Center—where literary rights are bought and sold.
• Remainders—from recent to the unique and hard to find titles, including books, music and sidelines
• Spanish Language Publishing—featuring publishers from Spanish speaking nations and U.S. publishers with Spanish titles
• University Press—books intended for academic use produced and published by universities
• Writers Row—new authors with one to two titles under their belts
• Other Pavilions include Graphic Novel, Travel, Art, and Audio

Register before May 23 and you may be eligible for a discount!

BEA 2008

Photo credits: Top, Veni/iStockphoto; Bottom, Bibica/iStockphoto

Publishers Invited to Nominate Authors and Poets to Participate in the 2008 NAACP Author Pavilion

The 2008 Author Pavilion, sponsored by the NAACP, will be held at the NAACP 99th National Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 12th through 15th, 2008. In the past 4 years approximately 7,000 patrons attended the National Conventions, which take place during the 3rd week in July.

WHAT: The NAACP invites publishers to nominate authors and poets to participate in the 2008 Author’s Pavilion. Preferred candidates are popular, nationally known authors who have won book awards or are best sellers at the national level. Publishers or Authors are expected to support the travel, hotel and miscellaneous expenses of accepted nominees to make their travel arrangements.

WHEN: At the 39th Annual Commerce and Industry Show July 12 through 15th during the NAACP 99th National Convention, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Meet and greets, Presentation Panels, book signings and live In the Café with Mocha Show tapings are the heart of the NAACP Author Pavilion experience, which is designed to bring readers together with their favorite writers and poets.

Author interviews and Author Pavilion Highlights will be seen and heard on the NAACP Website www.naacp.org/events/convention/99th after the convention. For additional information, please visit www.naacpauthorpavilion.com.

Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its more than half-million adult and youth members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities and monitors of equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.

PBE specializes in creating literary events in a variety of non-traditional venues and seeks out exciting new locales for readers and authors to connect. PBE is the sister company to The Oracle Group which produces the literary talk show “In the Café with Mocha.”

CONTACTS: Nominations should be sent by May 1st 2008 to Mocha Ochoa. Her email is mocha@professionalbookevents.com and her telephone number is 301-461-6925.

Photo credit: Belterz/iStockphoto

Gotta love these ladies. Not only are Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant stellar storytellers, they’re good peeps–warm, funny, engaging.

Check out their video trailer, where they talk about how they met, got started and continue to thrive as one of the hottest writing duos in the business.

Check out the interview I conducted with them earlier this year here. They talk about how they met and how they pen their bestselling novels together as well as their latest novel.

__________

Want to see more? Featured book trailers.

If anyone can compete with Barack Obama for best public speaker it’s Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who has signed with Broadway Books to write his memoir.

Patrick, a supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, became the first black governor of Massachusetts and the third black governor in the United States, when elected in November 2006. Prior to entering politics he worked in as an attorney and later in business.

More here.

Have you tried the new Borders bookstore website? It’s in beta (testing) now, but you can check out some of the sections.

You enter to what appears to be a bookshelf at a physical store and to the right you can click and look at various shelves (DVDs, books, music). This is sort of kin to selecting a general category at Amazon except you get a visual representation of the books listed, as if you were shopping at a physical store. Pretty cool, and I can imagine all sorts of ways this could be expanded in the future. Oprah is also front and center, with some exclusive video promoting her latest interest: Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.

One of the most promising sections is Borders Media, where you can watch videos of authors discussing their books in various settings. For example—

Borders Book Club: authors discuss their books with small groups in a living-room-like setting. Currently viewable authors include Jodi Picoult, Lalita Tademy, Elizabeth Gilbert, Khaled Hosseini and others.

Borders Live at 01: one on one interviews with authors, recorded on location at Borders Store 01 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently up for viewing is Deepak Chopra discussing his newest book and other authors.

Borders Kitchen: where you can watch video of cookbook authors whipping up some of their recipes.

Borders Advice for Living: you can watch varied authors discussing their books, such as Robin Roberts, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint. The theme for books featured here seems to be inspiration and motivation.

Many of the other sections—music, DVDs, kids—are not available yet but if they turn out to be as interactive as the media section, we could be in for a treat. Looks like Borders realizes that there’s something lacking in online shopping: other people. Not sure if this will ever replace getting out there and mingling, but Borders is obviously taking advantage of a lot of the newest bells and whistles available on the web to bring you a better online shopping experience.

They’re also trying to give Amazon some real competition. As much as I love Amazon, healthy competition is always a good thing.

Borders Beta

For more about innovation at Borders, see Borders Bookstore: Dinosaur Goes Digital

Photo credit: Pflorendo/iStockphoto

You knew her as the feisty Druscilla Winters on CBS’s daytime series, “The Young and the Restless.” You may also remember when she co-starred in the CBS primetime television series “Diagnosis Murder” with Dick Van Dyke. You might even be aware that Victoria Rowell has been nominated twice for a Daytime Emmy and awarded several NAACP Image Awards.

What you may not know is that Rowell is the child of an unmarried white mother and a black father who left her to foster care as an infant. She subsequently landed in several foster care homes throughout the first 18 years of her life before going on to become a dancer, teacher, model, actress and bestselling author. It was as an actress that Victoria Rowell really began to shine, starring in theater, primetime, daytime and feature films, often opposite some of Hollywood’s most famous leading men, including Beau Bridges, Jim Carrey, Dick Van Dyke, Mario Van Peoples, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson.

In her memoir, The Women Who Raised Me, Rowell pays tribute to the women she calls her “personal champions,” the women who guided and nurtured her during those formative early years. Among them are a black Bostonian who lived on a rural farm in Maine, a Paris-trained prima ballerina, and a mother and teacher living in a well-kept middle-class suburban neighborhood.

The Women Who Raised Me was first published in the spring of 2007 to much acclaim, hitting the New York Times bestsellers list. The paperback is due to be released this coming May, at which time Victoria Rowell will join me here in an interview for Connie Briscoe Presents.

She has a fantastic website with lots of celeb photos and a guest book–Victoria Rowell on the web.

Move over Jane Marple, here comes Precious Ramotswe.

Grammy Award winning singer and actress Jill Scott will star in an upcoming HBO series based on Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling series of mystery novels about a female-owned detective agency in Botswana. The title of both the mystery series and the fictional detective agency is The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Jill Scott plays Precious Ramotswe, and Akika Noni Rose of “Dreamgirls” will also star in the series, as Ramotswe’s quirky secretary.

I love a good mystery series and I especially like women detectives so I’m looking forward to this.

For more info. head over to Black Voices

I’m always sending folks from my MySpace page to my blog here, and it occurred to me that some of the people who come to my blog might not be aware that I have a MySpace page. Well, I do, and you can get to it here.

For the longest time, I avoided MySpace, thinking it was for the kiddies only. Then I ran into an author when I was doing a book signing, and she told me I absolutely had to get on MySpace and that my view about it was all wrong.

And she was right. Yeah, there are a gazillion kids on MySpace (not that there’s anything wrong with kids, heh!) but it’s also cool for adults, especially for artistic types like musicians and authors. It’s a fantastic way to get and stay in touch with readers and also to network with other like-minded types. And many authors use MySpace to promote their work.

So check me out at www.myspace.com/conniebriscoe if you haven’t already.

__________________________________________________

Only a few days left. I’m being featured today with an essay called “Acting White or Not Black Enough.”

For those who missed the original announcement, in recognition of Black History Month, APOOO Book Club has spotlighted one author each day since February 1 on the APOOO website. The spotlight includes an article written by the author on topics such as–

• Why Is Black History Important?
• Room at the Table (Is there room at the table for all African American authors no matter the genre?)
• Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (interracial dating)
• Acting White or Not Black Enough
• Are We Ready? (for a black president)

Some past authors featured are–

• Angelia Menchan
• Earl Sewell
• Sheila Goss
• Francis Ray
• Felicia Pride
• Eric Pete
• Jewel Parker Rhodes
• Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant

There’s bound to be an essay written by one of your favorite authors, so head on over!

APOOO Author Spotlight