Authors Rally to Support ‘Mama Dearest,’ E. Lynn Harris’s Last Novel
-- Publishers Weekly, 9/25/2009 6:13:00 AM
In an effort to honor the late bestselling author E. Lynn Harris, who died of a heart attack in L.A. in July, a group of friends and colleagues—Eric Jerome Dickey, Tananarive Due and Terry McMillan among them—are rallying to help promote the release of his last novel, Mama Dearest, which went on sale this week. Harris was a pioneering African American writer whose novels often focused on the lives of closeted African American gay men. Organized by Harris’s close friend, author Victoria Christopher Murray, a group of more than 12 authors around the country have designated Friday September 25 as an unofficial “E. Lynn Harris Day” and will visit local bookstores to read from the new novel and talk about their own experiences and relationships with Harris. Events have been scheduled for Eso Won Bookstore, a independent African American bookstore in L.A., Outwrite, a gay and lesbian bookstore in Atlanta, as well as a wide variety of bookstores all around the country.
Among the writers and others involved in this nationwide event are R.M. Johnson, Tina McElroy Ansa, Clarence Nero, Tracie Howard and Laura Gilmore (Harris’s assistant). Others include Terrance Dean and Tonya Lewis Lee, wife of Spike Lee, who will be at the Columbus Circle Borders in New York, Terry McMillan will read in San Francisco, ReShonda Tate Billingsley in Houston and Mary B. Morrison in Dallas.
Mama Dearest, which has an announced print run of 250,000 copies, will be published by Karen Hunter Publishing, an imprint of S&S. Harris was published by Doubleday for many years and switched to S&S after his longtime editor Janet Hill left the company. The new novel centers on Yancey Harrington Braxton, an aspiring entertainer with an explosive past who first appeared in Harris’s Not a Day Goes By.
