Chinese writer Jiang Rong has won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize for his novel WOLF TOTEM.  The novel is a fictional account of life in the 1970s, which draws on Rong's own personal experience of the Chinese-Mongolian region as one of the first intellectuals to move to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

The judging panel, headed by former Canadian governor general Adrienne Clarkson, hailed the book as a "masterly work [that] is also a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture."

Brian Miller of the Seattle Weekly writes that it's a lonely world for black romance writers like Edwina Martin-Arnold.  

Early in her writing career, before she was published, Martin-Arnold recalls, "I went to one [GSRWA] meeting, and it was extremely uncomfortable. It was a clique. Seattle's local chapter is distant—I guess that's a good word. I stay away." ...

As far as I know, I'm the only one in Seattle," she says, an imbalance that's reflected on the shelves of Wal-Mart, Costco, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Bartell, and other mass-market retailers, which sell around 40 percent of romance novels, according to the RWA. Study these in-store displays and you'll discern highly specific genres within romance: fantasy, paranormal, sci-fi, and especially historical—where swords, stallions, castles, hoopskirts, plantations, and domestic servants have strangely endured.

On Nov. 1 The Brown Bookshelf was officially launched by young adult authors Paula Chase and Varian Johnson, illustrator/author Don Tate, and children's books authors Carla Sarrat and Kelly Starling Lyons.  The Brown Bookshelf's mission is to let parents, librarians, teachers and others know about the wonderful black authors and books they've written for children.    

According to the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC), less than two percent of children's books published last year were written by African American authors. Want the raw numbers? That's just 87 children's books by African-American authors out of an estimated 5,000 children's books published in 2006 overall.

"When author Kyra E. Hicks shared that statistic on her blog and the African American Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (AACBWI) yahoo! listserv, I was shocked. I felt blessed to be a published, African-American children's book author, but saddened that there were still so few of us in print," says Lyons.  

Blackadelic Pop on Greg Tate: 

Last Friday evening at the Studio Museum of Harlem on a 125th Street, a bunch of the New York Niggerati (and a few palefaces)gathered to pay homage to cultural critic, short story writer, musician and Black aesthetic lighting rod Greg Tate. Looking as young as the day I first met him more than two decades before (black don’t crack), it was amazing that the brother was turning fifty years old.

...

For better or worse, if it were not for Greg Tate, there would be Bonz Malone, Harry Allen, Joan Morgan, Kris Ex, Scott Poulson Bryant, Toure, Danyel Smith, Michael Eric Dyson, Karen R. Goode, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Smokey Fontaine,John Caramanica, Jeff Chang, Amy Linden, Tom Terrell,Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia Rose, Sasha Jenkins, DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Dream Hampton, Miles Marshall Lewis,Aliya King, SekouWrites, Kenji Jasper, Oliver Wang, Cheo Hodari Coker, Keith Murphy or myself.