<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  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 has wandered by mistake into the crowd of predominantly middle-aged white women clad in comfortable flats and faded lipstick.  With her husband, Rich Coleman, in tow, Miasha bypasses the booth of Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster, parent of her publisher, Touchstone, and heads straight for the African-American Pavilion.There,Coleman hands out a calendar of Miasha&amp;#039;s 2008 events\u2014which include, in one month alone, the release of her fifth novel, Never Enough, and appearances at the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, the Black Expo in Indiana, a book fair in Harlem, and, back home in Philadelphia, opening night for a theatrical production of her first novel, Secret Society. Meanwhile, Miasha greets fans, fellow authors, and publishing execs with the nonchalance of a starlet. I wince as they wrap an arm around her and press their cheeks to hers. Her jaw is wired shut; she broke it in a car accident the week before.  &amp;quot;Hey, T,&amp;quot; Miasha greets Toy Styles, head of the Cartel Publications,in a clenched-teeth whisper.Styles shakes her head in admiration. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s my girl Miasha. Out here hustling with a broken jaw.&amp;quot;  That was last June, and Miasha, whose jaw healed nicely, by the way, hasn&amp;#039;t slowed down. Her latest novel, Chaser, due out this month, focuses on a love triangle set in the underworld of accident-insurance fraud (inexplicable, perhaps, until you know that tow trucks are her husband&amp;#039;s business). The couple is scheduled to do their usual drill at the 2009 BookExpo, with a few new twists. Samples of a rap song Miasha&amp;#039;s written, &amp;quot;Money in Your Pocket,&amp;quot; will be on offer, as will raffle tickets for her 2005 Maserati (the proceeds go to the Ask Miasha Foundation for underprivileged kids).  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 &amp;quot;street plays&amp;quot; of her novels\u2014all on her own dime. She also foots the bill for lavish red-carpet release parties\u2014complete with naked-models-in-body-paint re-creations of her book jackets\u2014which sparked a trend among her urban fiction compatriots. &amp;quot;People in the game always commend me for that,&amp;quot; she says.  Growing up with two crack-addicted parents in Philadelphia, Miasha had to learn how to hustle to survive. &amp;quot;Anything you can sell, you sell,&amp;quot; she explains, gazing from underneath bangs that tickle her eyelashes. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d make Kool-Aid, freeze it, and sell it as water ices. We&amp;#039;d put potato chips from a big bag into little baggies and sell them.&amp;quot; Once, her father asked 11-year-old Miasha to panhandle with him. He didn&amp;#039;t do it in the end, she says. &amp;quot;Thank God.&amp;quot;   But the lessons that taught her &amp;quot;to do what you have to do to get by&amp;quot; are now helping her to get ahead. Just as a rap album contract used to be the golden ticket out of Compton (or Queens), writing has become the creative soul&amp;#039;s unlikely conduit to fame and fortune. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m trying to be a household name,&amp;quot; Miasha says, &amp;quot;a substantial person in the entertainment industry, a Tyler Perry or Will and Jada.&amp;quot; With six titles out in just over three years; book contracts totaling $400,000; photo ops with Jamie Foxx, Kanye West, and Jay-Z; and media coverage by the CBS Early Morning Show, the CW Network, syndicated radio powerhouse Wendy Williams (the Oprah of urban fiction), Essence, and Black Entertainment Television, her once-improbable dream is seeming ever more probable.  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&amp;#039;s crowd the shelves of bookstores and tables of street vendors. Written in an expletive-laced, colloquial style, the opening sentences of Miasha&amp;#039;s first novel, which launched her career in 2004 with a bidding war between three New York publishers, are fairly typical: &amp;quot;You know what, bitch? You fucked with the wrong one! I&amp;#039;m gonna kill you right in front of ya little boyfriend, and then I&amp;#039;m gonna kill him!... Pop! Pop!&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;s books are engrossing\u2014I read one straight through sitting in a Borders\u2014and she has a talent for creating surprising plot twists and sympathetic characters, but after a prolonged ride through her fictional world I felt deadened, like I&amp;#039;d stayed up all night watching a Cops marathon on TV. A street-honed justice usually prevails in the end, but all the designer-brand obsession and sex-and drug-slinging adds up to a stereotypical vision of the black urban experience\u2014and left me feeling like I was colluding with it. Her books are competently written, but there is no beauty of language lurking behind the dark subject matter, no sense of redemption, no contextualization to illuminate the social roots of all the ugliness. It&amp;#039;s almost as if the craft of sentence writing associated with &amp;quot;literary fiction&amp;quot; is at odds with the quest to &amp;quot;keep it real.&amp;quot;  Of course, I&amp;#039;m not Miasha&amp;#039;s target audience. I live in gentrified Brooklyn; I&amp;#039;m older (her demo is ages high school through 30, according to her publisher); and I&amp;#039;m not black (although I&amp;#039;m not entirely white, either, but more on that later). Clearly, however, there is no lack of readers who relate. Sessalee Hensley, a fiction buyer for Barnes &amp;amp;amp; Noble who&amp;#039;s often called the most powerful woman in publishing,says that urban lit now dominates the African-American scene: &amp;quot;We have 25 or so new urban titles a month, versus about one of the literary titles.&amp;quot; With titles like Bitch Reloaded and Sistah for Sale (one of Miasha&amp;#039;s) and covers of scantily clad women and flashy cars, these books stand out in stores even beyond their disproportionate numbers\u2014to the dismay of some customers, Hensley admits, citing the heartfelt letters the chain has received pleading, &amp;quot;Why are you putting these books out?&amp;quot;  The answer is simple: Urban fiction sells. While Barnes &amp;amp;amp; Noble tries to assuage offended patrons by erecting as many marquee end-of-aisle displays for mainstream and literary African-American titles as for their urban counterparts, the book giant isn&amp;#039;t about to refuse to sell them. According to Hensley, in roughly 125 of the more than 700 Barnes &amp;amp;amp; Nobles around the country, urban fiction not only outsells classics by black authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, but also popular genre fiction like The Da Vinci Code. As for the owners of independent black bookstores, many say that, like it or not, they stock urban fiction to keep the lights on.   Some of the most fervent criticism of the genre comes from black literary writers (few of whom, it should be noted, ever receive the level of financial reward or media coverage Miasha has). In a New York Times editorial called &amp;quot;Their Eyes Were Reading Smut,&amp;quot; lit author Nick Chiles recalls encountering row upon row of urban fiction at a Borders: &amp;quot;I felt as if I was walking into a pornography shop, except in this case the smut is being produced by and for my people, and it is called `literature.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Later, in a letter leaked on the Internet, best-selling author Terry McMillan excoriated publishers of urban fiction for their &amp;quot;exploitative, destructive, racist, egregious, sexist, base, tacky, poorly written, unedited, degrading books.&amp;quot;  When I mention the controversy over lunch at the Napa Valley Grille in Los Angeles, Miasha smiles as much as her wired jaw will allow. Her husband, Rich, and I are digging into soft-shell crab while she drinks a shake through a straw. After they checked into their hotel, Rich, who takes time off from tow trucks and selling real estate to travel with his wife, went out to buy a blender, powdered protein, yogurt, and fruit. Miasha is four months pregnant with their second child (a boy, born last year and named Ace Nasir), and Rich is making sure she gets enough to eat.  Across the street from the restaurant is the Hammer Museum, where a retrospective of African-American artist Kara Walker is showing. Walker&amp;#039;s highly sexualized silhouettes of antebellum-era pickaninnies, mammies, and masters have made her famous, while also provoking a firestorm of criticism among some of her art-world elders. They accuse Walker of serving up despicable stereotypes for the viewing pleasure of white people, which echoes the scorn McMillan heaps on urban novels. &amp;quot;Old white men buy them to jerk off to in the bathroom,&amp;quot; she told me in an interview.  Detractors notwithstanding, the subtext of Walker&amp;#039;s work suggests that she is consciously using her incendiary images to examine the still-toxic influence of race on American culture. Miasha, however, isn&amp;#039;t trying to make a meta-point. Her message is literal. She wants to demonstrate the consequences of making bad choices, she says. &amp;quot;I know so many people who have this mentality of hustling men,&amp;quot; she says, shaking her head.  Yet black literary authors question whether ghetto fiction is anything like a faithful representation of living poor and black in urban America. Novelist and African literature professor Eisa Nefertari Ulen occasionally works with Brooklyn middle school kids, many of whom live in the projects. While the students gush over street lit for &amp;quot;keeping it real,&amp;quot; when she asks if they know people like those in the books, they draw a blank. And so does she, despite having a cousin on crack herself. &amp;quot;[Urban fiction] is a glamorization of black pathology,&amp;quot; Ulen says, &amp;quot;and we begin to accept this as our truth.&amp;quot;   Miasha counters that hip-hop stars, too, have had to defend themselves against charges that they celebrate materialism and violence, rather than merely report what they know. While the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, the battle lines have been drawn. As Miasha&amp;#039;s fellow street-writer Styles puts it: &amp;quot;You are not going to tell me that where I&amp;#039;m from and what I&amp;#039;ve been through is not worth reading.&amp;quot;  Miasha was four and living in West Philly when her parents split up; five when her mother started smoking crack and turned their home into a haven for dealers,addicts,and prostitutes; and six when her mom had her fifth child, born addicted to crack and taken by social services. &amp;quot;Then she left,&amp;quot; Miasha says, sounding more sad than angry, &amp;quot;and I didn&amp;#039;t see her again for seven years.&amp;quot;  Miasha went to live with her father, who&amp;#039;d moved in with his mother across the street. There she enjoyed what she describes as a normal childhood, for a few years, anyway: school, games of kickball, and open fire hydrants on hot summer days. But when she was nine, her grandmother died from cancer, and her father&amp;#039;s secret, post-bedtime crack habit erupted into an all-consuming daytime horror show. Once again, Miasha was living in a crack den, with bare cupboards and the oven on for heat.  &amp;quot;When I was 12, my aunt took me in because it got too bad,&amp;quot; she says, flicking her bangs from her eyes. Another aunt gave Miasha her first journal. &amp;quot;Writing allowed me to get out all the pain and emotion of what I was going through, without embarrassment or judgment,&amp;quot; she says. In public, she maintained a cheerful front\u2014 nobody she knew wanted to admit that they or their families were messing with drugs. Then, the summer after seventh grade, four kids from Miasha&amp;#039;s neighborhood and another from her school\u2014 all also 13 or 14; all low-leveldrug dealers; one a good friend\u2014were murdered. That&amp;#039;s when the threat of the crack epidemic really hit her. &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t just assume that my siblings and I would live until we were old. Any one of us could&amp;#039;ve been killed.&amp;quot;  A year later, her mom reappeared\u2014calling out of the blue from a hospital to say that Miasha had a baby brother, on top of two sisters born earlier in her mother&amp;#039;s seven-year absence. What should she name him? Miasha&amp;#039;s mom asked. &amp;quot;My sister was like, `How &amp;#039;bout Number Eight?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Miasha says, &amp;quot;but I was excited.&amp;quot; (But that child, too, was taken from her mother, who was still using.) Shortly afterward, Miasha, at 14, started dating Rich, whose family was still intact and who&amp;#039;s been a source of stability and confidence ever since.   As his wife talks, Rich watches her intently, his senses on high alert. Occasionally he gives an astonished laugh at all she&amp;#039;s been through. He seems slightly afraid, as if conjuring these years might reinvest them with a dangerous power. But to me, Miasha&amp;#039;s composure and objectivity discussing her own experiences is familiar. It&amp;#039;s what writers do: spin stories from the rough threads of their lives. Growing up, all the couple&amp;#039;s friends, everyone she and Rich knew, had the same goal:to escape.For boys, the favored route was dealing drugs; for girls, it was attaching themselves to guys who dealt drugs or otherwise enriched themselves; for Miasha, it was writing about the very world she was desperate to leave behind.  &amp;quot;For years, publishers said that black people didn&amp;#039;t read,&amp;quot; says Calvin Reid, who oversees African-American coverage for Publishers Weekly. That changed in 1992, when three black women\u2014Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan\u2014landed on the Times best-seller list. Publishing houses scrambled to sign up African-American authors, and some added specialty imprints for black audiences. But it wasn&amp;#039;t until 1999, when The Coldest Winter Ever, the story of a drug kingpin&amp;#039;s daughter written by Sister Souljah, racked up big numbers that people fully realized the commercial potential of tales from the street relayed in raw, unmediated language. (Ex-cons Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines garnered attention in the 1970s with &amp;quot;true life&amp;quot; novels, but the movement didn&amp;#039;t spread much beyond them.) At the same time, amateur black authors began putting out books themselves\u2014often after being rejected by conventional publishers\u2014and managed to sell far more copies than so-called legit writers.  A white editor for a New York publisher recalls a meeting 10 years ago in which a black editorial assistant enthused about a manuscript by &amp;quot;`this new African-American erotica writer, Zane.&amp;#039;... Eleven befuddled white faces stared back at her,&amp;quot; the editor says. When Zane couldn&amp;#039;t find a publisher, she released her first three novels on her own, selling more than 200,000 copies through a viral marketing campaign. (Eventually Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster snapped her up and even gave her an imprint to oversee.) According to 2008 figures from BookScan, the book division of Nielsen ratings, Zane has since sold 2-million-plus copies of her own works, not including sales online,in beauty salons,by street vendors,and at smaller black bookstores.  In 2001, Vickie Stringer self-published a novel she&amp;#039;d written while serving a seven-year sentence for drug trafficking, then sold it from the back of her car at her former drug-dealing haunts. The creative book tour moved 1,000 copies in a week, and now Stringer has her own six-figure deal with Malaika Adero, an editor and VP at Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster&amp;#039;s Atria division, while also running a profitable press of her own. A key to Stringer&amp;#039;s success, Adero says, is her knowledge of her (literally) captive audience: &amp;quot;[Stringer] knows that the incarcerated community has to buy in trade paperback.&amp;quot; Hardcover books might be wielded as weapons. Stringer also accepts postage stamps as payment because convicts don&amp;#039;t always have access to cash.  Major publishers, on the other hand, have often seemed at a loss about how to get books by black authors in front of people who might buy them. &amp;quot;Many of my colleagues didn&amp;#039;t know the difference between Essence and Ebony magazines or Tavis Smiley and a public access show,&amp;quot; Adero recalls. Even when they mastered the nuances of African-American media, publishers still had to contend with the consequences of pigeonholing their authors. If you put a person of color on the cover, will white readers still pick up the book? How do you avoid treating a black audience like a monolith? To what degree is sharing the cultural or ethnic background of characters in a book essential to the ability to enjoy it? Some people read with an eye toward having their suspicions about the world affirmed, while others read to discover what they don&amp;#039;t know. How does a marketing plan take all this into consideration? PICK UP THE JULY ISSUE OF ELLE FOR THE FULL STORY ON MIASHA "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a10160/pulp-princess-328287/>