A comprehensive guide that will assist many writers in navigating the publishing landscape.
Editors Dinkins and Washington present a collection of essays for Christian writers of color that will help aspiring authors of all backgrounds.
The editors gather insights from a well-rounded group of industry professionals in this volume. Writers and writing teachers offer articles on craftsmanship; one of Washington’s own contributions is an essay on “sensory details and figurative language.” Others give tips on editing and revision, as in editor and author Lisa A. Crayton’s presentation of “five key revision strategies.” But the most useful aspects of this book are the perspectives it provides from editors, agents, and publishers. Bruce R. Barbour, the founder of the Literary Management Group and a former Random House executive, includes a template for book proposals, explains when a writer needs a literary agent, and lists the differences between traditional publishers and other options. Agustin Agency founder Lluvia Agustin covers legal issues and identifies questions to consider before signing contracts. Despite these broadly useful tips, Dinkins and Washington don’t forget their primary audience; they also provide articles with specific professional insights for Christian writers from diverse backgrounds. Journalist and devotional writer Nancy Gavilanes, for example, explains “3 Keys to Writing Devotional Articles,” and Xochitl Dixon, a disabled Mexican contributor to the Christian publication Our Daily Bread, considers “The Ministry of Magazine Writing.” Other contributors speak explicitly to concerns that writers of color share, such as Christy Award Winner Patricia Raybon, a Black mystery fiction writer and teacher who explains how she cultivates writers’ voices in the classroom, and Terry M. Wildman, a pastor and lead translator/project manager for the First Nations Version of the Bible, who describes the importance of including familiar cultural references in Bible translations.
A comprehensive guide that will assist many writers in navigating the publishing landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 978-1948732000
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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