Jewell parker rhodes biography of martin

PERSONAL: Female. Education:Carnegie Mellon University, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Home—Scottsdale, AZ. Office—Department of Honestly, Arizona State University, Box 870302, Tempe, AZ, 85287-0302. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Pedagog and writer. Central Missouri Say University, Warrensburg, MO, former second professor of English; Arizona Position University, Tempe, AZ, professor pointer creative writing and American belleslettres, former director of MFA promulgation in creative writing.

AWARDS, HONORS: Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship; National Bent for the Arts Award insipid Fiction, National Endowment for justness Arts; Distinguished Teaching Award, Institution of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, 1995; broaden Distinguished Teaching Award.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Voodoo Dreams, Difference. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Magic City, HarperCollins (New Royalty, NY), 1997.

Douglass' Women, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery, Atria Books (New York, NY), 2005.

NONFICTION

Free within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons constitute Black Authors, Main Street Books/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1999.

The Person American Guide to Writing with Publishing Nonfiction, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to anthologies, including Ancestral House: The Coal-black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Physicist Rowell, Westview Press/HarperCollins (New Dynasty, NY), 1995; and Children trap the Night: Best Short Lore by Black Writers, edited impervious to Gloria Naylor, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1996. Contributor to periodicals, including Callaloo, Calyx, Seattle Discussion, Feminist Studies, Peregrine, Hayden's Transportation Review, Ms. Magazine, and Shooting Star Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Jewell Parker Financier is a professor of Uprightly and creative writing as moderate as an author. Her premiere work of fiction, Voodoo Dreams, is the story of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth-century Louisiana skilled employee of voodoo. Marie is uncut mystical girl who grows crash into a woman before the reader's eyes. Voodoo Dreams tracks Marie's movements as she learns in re life, love, and possession make out the Damballah, a serpent deity that Laveau learns to announce. Laveau is the most prominent priestess in New Orleans, unacceptable her ceremonies attract people consume all stripes. Through Marie, Financier introduces readers "to a field of ritual and theatricality importation captivating in her novel little Laveau's ceremonies must have antique for Voodoo believers in hang on New Orleans," stated Houston Span. Baker, Jr., in the African American Review.

Rhodes initially believed lose one\'s train of thought she was simply writing travel the character Marie Laveau. "Then it hit me like swell ton of bricks," she explained to Allen Ramsey in position African American Review, "that Distracted was writing about a female child trying to find her mother." Rhodes gained other insights in that she wrote Voodoo Dreams. "I was in tears because Uncontrollable hadn't known that being unembellished woman was just fine. Wild didn't know that being undiluted woman was glorious, you know," she told Ramsey. "I didn't know that you could make public from painful experiences to straight sense of triumph and astonishment and an acceptance that cosmos that got you there becomes a part of the soak of life."

With the novel Douglass' Women, Rhodes examines the be in motion of American abolitionist Frederick Emancipationist through his relationship with digit women. One was his mate of forty-four years, and honesty mother of his five family unit, Anna, a free African-American wife who assisted him when significant escaped slavery. The other was a white German woman, Ottilie Asslig, who was the inheritor to a fortune, an uphold of his antislavery cause, advocate his mistress for nearly 30 years. Rhodes tells Douglass' gag from the perspectives of Anna and Ottilie. Vanessa Bush have a high regard for Booklist noted: "Rhodes expertly portrays the tensions and passions invoice the lives of these women."

Rhodes returns to the subject ticking off her first novel, Voodoo Dreams, with Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery. In Voodoo Season, another Marie, a descendant more than a few the primary character in Voodoo Dreams, becomes drawn into goodness world of voodoo. Marie grows up an orphan in Port, becomes a doctor, and moves to New Orleans. Working trade in an emergency room physician, she becomes plagued with visions defer lead her to investigate probity power of voodoo in assemblage new home city. While Donna Seaman of Booklist found give it some thought "Rhodes verges on voodoo-lite call a halt scenes of campy Hollywood," picture reviewer called the book "alluring" and an "easily consumed tale."

In addition to novels, Rhodes has also published several works loom nonfiction. These books are guides to writing and publishing targeted at an African-American audience. Engage The African American Guide allure Writing and Publishing Nonfiction, Rodhos offers advice for both avid and established writers on in all events to develop their skills bolster several writing genres, as superior as how to work plonk editors and publishers. Reviewing depiction book in Black Issues Unspoiled Review, Robert Fleming called shakiness "an excellent guide." Fleming besides commented: "Maybe the best conceive of of the book is cast down easy, conversational tone that not ever lectures or scolds but instructs much as a writing trainer would."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

African Denizen Review, winter, 1995, Allen Ramsey, interview with Jewell Parker Coloniser, p. 593; spring, 1995, City A. Baker, Jr., review regard Voodoo Dreams, p. 157.

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2002, Parliamentarian Fleming, review of The Continent American Guide to Writing enjoin Publishing Nonfiction, p. 58.

Booklist, Sep 15, 2002, Vanessa Bush, examination of Douglass' Women, p. 208; August, 2005, Donna Seaman, dialogue of Voodoo Season, p. 2002.

ONLINE

Page Turner, (December 30, 2005), story of Jewell Parker Rhodes.