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Showing posts from October, 2020

African Writers in US Publishing

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 Back in 2007, when I started this blog, I was lamenting the scarcity of fiction by African writers in US bookstores.  I knew this very well, for I had spent five of my ten years in the US working for a bookstore, crawling my way to Inventory Manager, where my efforts to expand the African literature collection were frustrated by lack of inventory that was within the US distribution system. But by 2007, signs were showing of books by African writers making their way into the country, some of them becoming instant bestsellers (and bestseller to me may not mean that a lot of Americans were buying them, but that Africans based in the US were buying them). Now you could find works by Chimamanda Adichie, Petina Gappah, Maaza Mengiste, and others. But still, I felt back then that a lot more promotion of the writing was needed. So whenever there was a new publication by an African writer, I celebrated it on this blog, and I got to interview some of the writers on my other blogging platforms.