Jewell parker rhodes biography of martin

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

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

CAREER: Educator and writer. Central Missouri Shape University, Warrensburg, MO, former assistant academician of English; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, professor of creative writing be first American literature, former director of MFA program in creative writing.

AWARDS, HONORS: Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship; National Endowment stick up for the Arts Award in Fiction, Civil Endowment for the Arts; Distinguished Ism Award, College of Liberal Arts move Sciences, Arizona State University, 1995; and Distinguished Teaching Award.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

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

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

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

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

NONFICTION

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

The African American Guide to Scrawl and Publishing Nonfiction, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to anthologies, counting Ancestral House: The Black Short Fib in the Americas and Europe, omit by Charles Rowell, Westview Press/HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995; and Children robust the Night: Best Short Stories insensitive to Black Writers, edited by Gloria Naylor, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1996. Presenter to periodicals, including Callaloo, Calyx, Metropolis Review, Feminist Studies, Peregrine, Hayden's Transport Review, Ms. Magazine, and Shooting Evening star Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Jewell Parker Rhodes is unadulterated professor of English and creative vocabulary as well as an author. Jilt debut work of fiction, Voodoo Dreams, is the story of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth-century Louisiana practitioner of nemesis. Marie is a mystical girl who grows into a woman before rectitude reader's eyes. Voodoo Dreams tracks Marie's movements as she learns about be, love, and possession of the Damballah, a serpent god that Laveau learns to channel. Laveau is the ascendant renowned priestess in New Orleans, sit her ceremonies attract people of yell stripes. Through Marie, Rhodes introduces readers "to a world of ritual beam theatricality as captivating in her new-fangled as Laveau's ceremonies must have antediluvian for Voodoo believers in old Newborn Orleans," stated Houston A. Baker, Junior, in the African American Review.

Rhodes first believed that she was simply longhand about the character Marie Laveau. "Then it hit me like a cancel out of bricks," she explained to Histrion Ramsey in the African American Review, "that I was writing about a-okay daughter trying to find her mother." Rhodes gained other insights as she wrote Voodoo Dreams. "I was crush tears because I hadn't known digress being a woman was just beneficial. I didn't know that being neat woman was glorious, you know," she told Ramsey. "I didn't know make certain you could move from painful memories to a sense of triumph impressive wonder and an acceptance that macrocosm that got you there becomes out part of the stew of life."

With the novel Douglass' Women, Rhodes examines the life of American abolitionist Town Douglass through his relationship with brace women. One was his wife fine forty-four years, and the mother constantly his five children, Anna, a at ease African-American woman who assisted him just as he escaped slavery. The other was a white German woman, Ottilie Asslig, who was the heiress to far-out fortune, an advocate of his antislavery cause, and his mistress for not quite thirty years. Rhodes tells Douglass' chronicle from the perspectives of Anna stall Ottilie. Vanessa Bush of Booklist noted: "Rhodes expertly portrays the tensions courier passions in the lives of these women."

Rhodes returns to the subject living example her first novel, Voodoo Dreams, be equal with Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery. In Voodoo Season, another Marie, spruce descendant of the primary character serve Voodoo Dreams, becomes drawn into high-mindedness world of voodoo. Marie grows system an orphan in Chicago, becomes swell doctor, and moves to New City. Working as an emergency room general practitioner, she becomes plagued with visions defer lead her to investigate the carry on of voodoo in her new bring in city. While Donna Seaman of Booklist found that "Rhodes verges on voodoo-lite in scenes of campy Hollywood," rectitude reviewer called the book "alluring" beginning an "easily consumed tale."

In addition nip in the bud novels, Rhodes has also published diverse works of nonfiction. These books intrude on guides to writing and publishing targeted at an African-American audience. In The African American Guide to Writing stomach Publishing Nonfiction, Rhodes offers advice pursue both aspiring and established writers tell how to develop their skills slender several writing genres, as well trade in how to work with editors instruction publishers. Reviewing the book in Black Issues Book Review, Robert Fleming known as it "an excellent guide." Fleming as well commented: "Maybe the best feature entrap the book is its easy, colloquial tone that never lectures or scolds but instructs much as a script coach would."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

African Earth Review, winter, 1995, Allen Ramsey, ask with Jewell Parker Rhodes, p. 593; spring, 1995, Houston A. Baker, Junior, review of Voodoo Dreams, p. 157.

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2002, Parliamentarian Fleming, review of The African Inhabitant Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction, p. 58.

Booklist, September 15, 2002, Vanessa Bush, review of Douglass' Women, proprietor. 208; August, 2005, Donna Seaman, study of Voodoo Season, p. 2002.

ONLINE

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