Last week's feature story, "Story of My Life," crack-dealer-turned-author Quentin Carter admits that his past as a criminal -- plus writing all of his books behind bars -- probably helped make him a street lit superstar on the Essence bestseller list. For those of you discouraged that you'll never had the street cred necessary to be a writer like Carter, don't worry. You just have to look at the east side of the state, and Triple Crown novelist Keisha Ervin.
Our sister publication in St. Louis, the Riverfront Times, wrote an amazing profile of Ervin a couple months ago.
Here's just a taste of reporter Kristen Hinman's story to get you interested:
Don't get Ervin wrong, her little Eminence Drive abode in St. John, with the walls she painted pumpkin and the colonial-style furnishings, has served her well since she ponied up seven months' rent, and the landlord looked at her funny, like, She's 24 and an author? Yeah, right.
That was 2006, right after a $30,000 royalty check arrived for sales on Ervin's second novel, Chyna Black, which opened like this:
All my drama began when I was fifteen, that's the year that I came out of my shell and broke loose. All of my woman's curves came alive and all of the old heads were peepin' me out. ...I had a banging body to be only fifteen years old. My face was innocent, but that was about it. Shit, by the time I was ten, I was in a C-cup bra. I'm seventeen now and my cup size had grown to a double D, and with my small waist and apple bottom, all the fellas were screaming, "Drop it like it's hot!" ...My stock was high and niggas in every hood wanted to invest.
The baby-mama drama of a St. Louis teen mother and high school dropout-cum-fiction writer named Chyna Black, the book was largely the story of Keisha Ervin's life. And since its publication in late 2004, the 27-year-old Ervin has propelled herself from Shop 'n Save cashier to starlet of the street-lit scene."
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