Luncheon Program, October 20, 1996
A Potpourri of Genres

Pictures from the Event

Louise Moses - Agnes Davis Scholarship Award

AUTHORS' BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Amanda Wheeler
A business attorney, she stunned family and friends when she announced the publication of her first novel, Arms Of The Magnolia, by Ballantine Publishing Group in August of 1994. Wheeler's follow-up novel, Beyond The Fire, a seventies-based piece, reaffirmed her strong social consciousness and commitment to portraying positive relationships between African American women and men. A March25, 1996 review in Publishers Weekly concluded that Beyond The Fire incorporates, "…a great final twist and a real sense of the difficult political atmosphere facing blacks when the radical spirit of the '60's faced the stark realities of the '70's." "The lead characters are excellent, and the support cast is top rate.. it is the glimpse at the educated Black American in the early 1970's that makes this a classy, nostalgic reading experience." (Affaire de Cotter, April1996).

Raised in the segregated South during the 1950's, she draws upon her experience some pleasant, others painful, to create characters who "actually live in the reader's mind." (The Time Machine March/April 1996). A 1975 graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law, U.C. Berkeley, the attorney-turned-author continues to work in private practice but admits to being irreversibly bitten by the writing bug. Her third work, Hush, is scheduled for publication in August of 1997.

Paula L. Woods
Great-granddaughter of an African American college president and granddaughter of an AME minister, she obtained her BA in English and Black studies before obtaining a master's degree from UCLA. Turning to business, she has spent the last fifteen years as a successful marketing executive and consultant. She is co-author of I, Too, Sing America: The African American Book of Days, co-editor of I Hear a Symphony: African Americans Celebrate Love, which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Multicultural Literature and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Fiction Honors, and editor of Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century.

Felix H. Liddell
Born in Chicago, Illinois, he is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago and Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. He is co-editor of I, Too, Sing America which brought him back to his first love, art, after nearly two decades as a successful businessman and owner of his own consulting firm. He is also co-editor of I Hear a Symphony, an outstanding collection of essays, letters, poems and artwork celebrating love.

Gary Phillips
Born in the same year Uncle Walt opened Disneyland, he found life was no ride through the Magic Kingdom growing up in South Central Los Angeles: He's been an activist for more than 22 years in Los Angeles on issues ranging from police abuse, affordable housing, the anti-apartheid movement, demilitarization, gang intervention, the narco-industrial complex, and neighborhood economic empowerment.

His op-eds, reviews and articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. View, the Daily News, the San Francisco Examiner, and other magazines. He's produced a weekly column for the Compton Bulletin newspaper for over three years and has written a chapter on organizing across boundaries in Multiethnic Coalition building In Los Angeles from Regina books.

His' first novel, Violent Spring, is a politically-charged mystery featuring black private eye Ivan Monk's search for killers in post-uprising Los Angeles. Violent Spring has been optioned for an HBO movie. He has a short story in an anthology of black mystery writers, Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes, and his second Monk novel, Perdition, U.S.A. is out now.

Gar Anthony Haywood
He is the Shamus and Anthony award-winning author of six mystery novels, four featuring the African American private investigator Aaron Gunner, and two recounting the adventures of Joe and Dottie Loudermilk, Airstream-owning crime solvers extraordinaire. Having written for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, he is presently on the writing staff of the Fox Television Program "New York Undercover."

His first Gunner mystery, Fear of the Dark, won the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus award for Best First Novel of 1989, while the New York Times called his first Loudermilk mystery, 1984's Going Nowhere Fast, "a dizzying and hilarious escape." His first Aaron Gunner short story, "And Pray Nobody Sees You," appeared in the Doubleday anthology Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes, and won both the PWA's Shamus and World Mystery Convention's Anthony awards for Best Short Story of 1995. A Joe and Dottie Loudermilk short story, "A Mother Always Knows," will appear in Funny Bones, an E.P. Dutton anthology of humorous crime stories to be published in the fall of 1997.