The Method, Madness, and Marketing of Street Lit [Response Essay]

by Latoya Peterson

The best article I have read to date on street lit was published last month in Elle Magazine.

Author Bliss Broyard – who explored her family’s complicated racial past in her book One Drop – presents the story of Miasha, a force in her own right and the subject of envy by other street lit authors.

Miasha, a 28-year old novelist, is walking through the Los Angeles Convention Center, home to the 2008 BookExpo America, an annual publishing conference. Sporting large diamond hoop earrings, sequined Manolos, and a short, lime green dress with a keyhole neckline that reveals impressive cleavage for her tiny frame, Miasha, an African-American novelist who is one of the biggest names in urban fiction, looks as if she wandered by mistake into the crowd of predominantly middle aged white women clad in comfortable flats and faded lipstick. [...]

Although Miasha has sold a respectable 200,000 books, she flies herself to the BookExpo and all the other literary and African-American festivals she attends. She prints (and pays for) T-shirts and tote bags she gives away. She maintains her website, produces a webcast featuring scenes from her life, and has begun staging “street plays” of her novels – all on her own dime. She foots the bill for lavish red-carpet release parties – complete with naked-models-in-body-paint re-creations of her book jackets – which sparked a trend among her urban fiction compatriots. “People in the game always commend me for that,” she says.

Boyard’s article fascinated me for a number of reasons. In addition the Miasha’s story, which is engaging in its own right, Broyard also adds her own history to the mix, draws a comparison to the work of Miasha and Kara Walker and sheds a light on the struggles of black authors working within the publishing industry.

Street Lit, Itself

Called hip-hop lit, street lit, and ghetto fiction, as well as the more decorous urban fiction, sex-drenched tales of crime, drugs, and glamour like Miasha’s crowd the shelves of bookstores and the tables of street vendors. Written in expletive-laced, colloquial style, the opening sentences of Miasha’s first novel, which launched her career in 2004 with a bidding war between three New York publishers, are fairly typical: “You know what, bitch? You fucked with the wrong one!I’m gonna kill you right in front of ya little boyfriend and then I’m gonna kill him!…Pop! Pop!” What follows is a suspenseful saga of two transvestites who use men to keep themselves in Marc Jacobs handbags, Dior minidresses, and Range Rovers.

Miasha is one of the many authors riding the boom of street lit, a topic we’ve tackled once before, in reference to young adult literature. In my last post, I wondered why so many of the young girls I knew were bypassing the YA section of the book store or library and heading straight to the adult oriented titles. Since then, I’ve wondered what the draw is for street lit. Who composes the market, and why?

It isn’t too difficult to find street lit on the shelves – it tends to crowd out everything else, it’s racy titles and provocative covers serving as a beacon to the genre’s fans. And the beacon is working – street lit stacks big numbers. As Broyard writes:

Sessalee Hensley, a fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble who’s often called the most powerful woman in publishing, says that urban lit now dominates the African-American scene: “We have 25 or so new urban titles a month, versus about one of the literary titles.” With titles like Bitch Reloaded and Sistah for Sale (one of Miasha’s) and covers of scantily clad women and flashy cars, these books stand out in stores even beyond their disproportionate numbers – to the dismay of some customers, Hensley admits, citing the heartfelt letters the chain has received pleading, “Why are you putting these books out?”

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