Photo Credit: Mosaic Issue 18, Spring 2007

Eisa Nefertari Ulen teaches English at Hunter College in New York City, and her essays have been widely anthologized. Nominated by Essence magazine for a National Association of Black Journalists Award, she has contributed to numerous other publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, and CreativeNonfiction.org.

She is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Eisa graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master's degree from Columbia University. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

Eisa Ulen on Black English

Crystelle Mourning
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Atria (August 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743277589
ISBN-13: 978-0743277587
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches

AALBC.com #1 selling book for May/June 2006

Reviews

"With its languid pacing and rhythmic voice, Eisa Nefertari Ulen's novel at times feels like an elongated spoken-word poem....Ulen manages to pull it off with her nuanced depictions of Black life and her obvious love for her characters as they strive to create new realities out of the heartbreaking events of the past."
'The Washington Post

"Ulen wisely takes her time revealing Crystelle's pain, creating an authentic quality to her story. You feel for Crystelle...even as you're urging her to move forward and leave the past behind."
'Essence

"Eisa is a careful writer who strives to craft character, scene, and ambiguity. Her voice has the beauty and economy of poetry."
'Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Rails Under My Back

"Affirms faith in the enduring power of young love. Welcome Eisa Ulen."
'Elizabeth Nunez, author of Prospero's Daughter and Bruised Hibiscus

Read an Excerpt from Crystelle Mourning

About the Book

With her well-employed fianc' and a comfortable life in New York City, Crystelle has a life most young professionals would envy. She has come a long way from the rough Philadelphia neighborhood where she grew up. But she hasn't left the past behind her. A ghost from her West Philly days continues to haunt her -- the spirit of her high school sweetheart Jimmie, who she watched get gunned down one unforgettable night years ago. Emotionally distraught from her unsettling memories and the suspicion she may be pregnant, Crystelle goes back to her old neighborhood to reconnect with friends and family. There, with the help of Jimmie's mother, a woman who Crystelle loves like family -- and who makes a prison visit to the young man who murdered her son -- Crystelle can finally come to grips with her past, realizing the power of forgiveness and the need to move on.

A profound and intense story with deeply resonant depictions of urban African American life, Crystelle Mourning is a triumphant, lyrical beginning to a bright new talent in fiction.

Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature
Click to order via Amazon

Kevin Powell (Editor)

From across the globe, here is a historic gathering of some hundred of the greatest black writers of this era. Bringing together emerging literary talent along with established and award-winning writers like Booker Prize'winner Ben Okri, Junot D'az, Edwidge Danticat, Paul Beatty, Joan Morgan, Sarah Jones, and Hilton Als, Step into a World is a provocative anthology that offers a window into crucial issues of post'Civil Rights and post colonial black life.

Compiled by Kevin Powell (whom famed scholar Michael Eric Dyson called "one of America's most brilliant young cultural critics"), this extraordinary collection contains a range of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism'some never before published'along with e-mails, letters, manifestos, and the new genre of hip-hop journalism, here in book form for the first time. Indeed, hip-hop music, culture, and politics permeate Step into a World, as many of the writers have been affected in some way by the biggest pop cultural phenomenon of the past twenty-five years.

Hailing from the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and Africa, these luminary writers present poignant and powerful thoughts on racial identity, gender oppression, homophobia, classism, Tiger Woods, the black intelligentsia, Oprah's Book Club, and the Beat Generation, as well as blunt assessments on the crack epidemic, police brutality, postintegration America, and the future state of Africa.

The first major collection of contemporary black writing in nearly a decade, Step into a World includes writers born as early as 1957 and as recently as 1977. The result is an anthology full of energy and stylistic variations, and it is an incredible journey into the richly textured world of the new black literature

Related Links