Jewell Parker Rhodes
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Jewell Parker Rhodes |
Jewell
Parker Rhodes is a novelist, the Virginia G. Piper Chair in Creative Writing
and Artistic Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center in Creative Writing
at Arizona State University. She has also served as Director of the Master
of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Arizona State University (1996-1999).
Her first novel, Voodoo Dreams, (St. Martin's Press/Picador USA) focused on the spiritual development of Marie Laveau, a nineteenth century free women of color, who became a leader for women's and black peoples rights in the racist and sexist society of 19th century New Orleans. This novel was selected for the Barnes and Noble "Discover Series" and received a rare diamond from Kirkus Reviews and a star from Booklist (American Library Association). Voodoo Dreams has been featured in Quality Paperback Book Club, published in England by Hodder-Headline, translated into German for Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag and into Italian for Sperling Kupfer Publishers. A staged reading of her play Voodoo Dreams (based upon her novel) was produced by the Institute for the Study of the Arts at Arizona State University in February 2001.
Rhodes's novel, Magic City, was published in hardcover and paperback by HarperCollins Publishers; book club rights were sold to Doubleday/Literary Guild. Magic City focuses on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 in which the black community, Deep Greenwood, was bombed from the air by National Guardsmen. Both a white woman's and a black man's sexuality were exploited as the cause for the riot. Both characters exhibit moral courage as they journey toward their own self-identity, the fulfillment of their own dreams. Weaving African American spiritual traditions and Houdini's Jewish heritage and dreams, the novel was selected by the Chicago Tribune as one of its favorite books of 1997; its reviewer said the novel "gleams with clarity and with vivid-yet succinct metaphors. With Magic City, Rhodes has captured many truths, refining the crusted raw materials of history into a luminous work." Rhodes's third book, Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors, (Main Street Books: Doubleday) was published in October 1999 and subsequently published by Quality Paperback Book Club. The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Non-Fiction was published by Doubleday in January 2002.
Rhodes's latest historical novel, Douglass' Women, was published by
Atria Books, October 2002. This novel was awarded the 2003 American Book Award,
2003 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Literary Excellence,
the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the PEN
Center USA Award in Fiction and for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Douglass'
Women received a five star review from Book and was cited as a "courageous
and beautiful book" by the Washington Post Book World. This novel
explores the inner lives of the women who contributed to the greatness of
the famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. Both Anna Douglass, Douglass'
wife of thirty years, and Ottilie Assing, a German, half-Jewish and Christian
intellectual, and Douglass' long-time mistress, provided substantial support
which has been historically undervalued and unrecognized. Her novel reclaims
both women as valuable women who contributed, in different ways, to the struggle
for abolition, suffrage, and literacy. Douglass' Women was also a selection
of the Washington Post Book World Book Club and an excerpt was read
recently on NPR's
"Selected Shorts.
Her short fiction has been anthologized in Gumbo, edited by Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris, Children of the Night: Best Short Stories By Black Writers, edited by Gloria Naylor (Little Brown, 1996), in Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell (Westview Press/Harper Collins, 1995), and in African Americans in the West: A Century of Short Stories, ed. Glasrud and Champion (University Press of Colorado, 2000).
In 2002, her essay, "Mixed Blood Stew" appeared in Creative Nonfiction. "Evan" appeared in Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Writing About Their Sons, edited by Pat Stevens; her memoir essay, "Georgia on Her Mind," was published by the Oxford American. Other essays and short fiction appear in: Creative Nonfiction, Callaloo, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Feminist Studies, CITYAZ, Hayden's Ferry Review, and in the McDougal-Little: The Language of Literature, among others. Rhodes has also served as co-editor for the D.C. Heath Middle Level Literature Series for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders (publisher, D.C. Heath & Co., 1995).
She has received a Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship, the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction, and was selected as Writer-in-Residence for The National Writer's Voice Project. She has been awarded the California State University Distinguished Teaching Award. At Arizona State University, she has been awarded the Dean's Quality Teaching Award, Outstanding Thesis Director from the Honors College, and the Outstanding Faculty Award from the College of Extended Education.
She has served as Creative Writing Delegate for the Modern Language Association
and is a member of the Arizona Women's Forum/International Women's Forum.
She received a Bachelor of Arts in Drama Criticism, a Master of Arts in English,
and a Doctor of Arts in English (Creative Writing) from Carnegie-Mellon University.