Jewell Parker Rhodes Books In Order

Ninth Ward

Twelve year old Lanesha lives in a tight knit community in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. She doesn’t have a fancy house like her uptown family or lots of friends like the other kids on her street. But what she does have is Mama Ya Ya, her fiercely loving caretaker, wise in the ways of the world and able to predict the future. So when Mama Ya Ya’s visions show a powerful hurricane Katrina fast approaching, it’s up to Lanesha to call upon the hope and strength Mama Ya Ya has given her to help them both survive the storm. Ninth Ward is a deeply emotional story about transformation and a celebration of resilience, friendship, and family as only love can define it.

Voodoo Dreams of Marie Laveau

New Orleans in the mid nineteenth century: a potent mix of whites, Creoles, free blacks, and African slaves, a city pulsing with crowds, commerce, and an undercurrent of secret power. The source of this power is the voodoo religion, and its queen is Marie Laveau, the notorious voodooienne, worshipped and feared by blacks and whites alike.

Voodoo Season

Voodoo Season revisits the mystical landscape of New Orleans and its most famous Voodoo priestess, Marie Laveau that Jewell Parker Rhodes introduced us to in her previous novel Voodoo Dreams. This time, the award winning author of historical fiction sets the story in the here and now.

Meet Marie Levant. The great great granddaughter of the beloved, tantalizing Marie Laveau, she is compelled by unseen forces to leave her medical career in Chicago behind and return to her roots. But once she arrives in New Orleans, Marie is both seduced and horrified by this mysterious landscape whose slave holding past merges with the spoils of the twenty first century. A place where the Quadroon Balls of yesterday are a present reality, and women of color are still being abused and even more horrifying rendered ‘undead.’ Yet through it all, Marie can’t help but sense that she’s lived here before…
and that maybe there’s more to this city’s history and her own.

With Voodoo Season, Rhodes once again presents her legions of fans with a hero*ine of authentic power and an alluring, unforgettable read.

Moon

A jazzman, a wharf worker, a prostitute, all murdered. Wrists punctured, their bodies impossibly drained of blood. What connects them? Why are they rising as ghosts?

Marie Levant, the great great granddaughter of the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau, knows better than anyone New Orleans’s brutal past the legacy of slavery, poverty, racism, and sexism and as a doctor at Charity Hospital’s ER, she treats its current victims.

The struggle becomes personal, as the wazimamoto is intent on destroying her and all the Laveau descendants. Marie fights to protect her daughter, lover, and herself from the wazimamoto’s seductive assault on both body and spirit.

Echoing with the heartache and triumph of the African American experience, the soulful rhythms of jazz, and the horrors of racial oppression, Yellow Moon gives us an unforgettable hero*ine sexy, vulnerable, and mysterious in Marie Levant, while it powerfully evokes a city on the brink of catastrophe.

Yellow Moon is part two of the New Orleans trilogy that began with Voodoo Season magical realist fiction that takes the legend of the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, as imagined by Jewell Parker Rhodes in the bestselling Voodoo Dreams, into the present day.

Magic City

‘A mystical tale, full of spirits…
Rhodes’s exciting and moving novel takes off at a vigorous, lively clip from the first page, plunging through complex ideas and relationships without neglecting any of them.’ San Francisco Chronicle Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. A white woman and a black man are alone in an elevator. Suddenly, the woman screams, the man runs out, and the chase to capture and lynch him begins. When Joe, a young man trying to be the next Houdini, is accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty lynch mob. And Mary, the motherless daughter of a farmer who tries to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, must find the courage to help exonerate the man she had accused with her panicked cry. Based on true events, Magic City is a portrait of an era, climaxing in the heroic but doomed stand that pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the town they had built into the ‘Negro Wall Street.’ Named by the Chicago Tribune as a Favorite Book of 1997 ‘Jewell Parker Rhodes’s characters hover. They dance and sing and cry and whisper secrets in your ear.’ Emerge

Douglass’ Women

The critically acclaimed author of ‘Voodoo Dreams’ delivers an inspired work of historical fiction about the warring passions that drove the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass and two women one black, one white who loved him. ‘Douglass’ Women‘ reimagines the lives of an American hero, Frederick Douglass, and two women his wife and his mistress who loved him and lived in his shadow. Anna Douglass, a free woman of color, was Douglass’ wife of forty four years, who bore him five children. Ottilie Assing, a German Jewish intellectual, provided him the companionship of the mind that he needed. Hurt by Douglass’ infidelity, Anna rejected his notion that only literacy freed the mind. For her, familial love rivaled intellectual pursuits. Ottilie was raised by parents who embraced the ideal of free love, but found herself entrapped in an unfulfilling love triangle with America’s most famous self taught slave for nearly three decades. In her finest novel to date, Jewell Parker Rhodes vividly resurrects these two extraordinary women from history, portraying the life they led together under the same roof of the Douglass home. Here, fiery emotions of passion, jealousy, and resentment churn as the women discover an uneasy solidarity in shared love for an exceptional and powerful man. ‘Douglass’ Women‘ fills the gaps and silences that history has left in an unforgettable epic full of heartache and triumph.

Porch Stories

Award winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes offers a loving tribute to her beloved grandmother, the love she received, and the lessons she learned.

Free Within Ourselves

A Bird by Bird for the African American market A top notch writer’s guide filled with practical guidance, essays, and journal exercises for the African American writer including advice from E. Lynn Harris, Charles Johnson, and Yolanda Joe. In her introduction, Jewell Parker Rhodes writes: ‘Never in four years of college or five years of graduate school was I assigned an exercise or given a story example that included a person of color…
While the educational system and the publishing world have become progressively more welcoming of African American authors, there is still little attention to educating, supporting, and sustaining the writing process of African American authors. Free Within Ourselves is a solid first step it is the book I wished I had when I started out as a writer. It is meant to be a song of encouragement for African American artisits and visionaries. Free Within Ourselves is a step by step introduction to fictional technique, exploring story ideas, and charting one’s progress, as well as a resource guide for publishing fiction.’For the legions of people who have a novel stuck in their word processors, help is finally on the way! Free Within Ourselves is an excellent guide to all the elements necessary to crafting fiction: character development, point of view, plot, atmosphere, dialogue, diction, sentence variety, and revision. Writing techniques are taught using exercises, journaling, story examples, and analyses of famous writing fragments, as well as several complete stories including those of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Dandicat, among others. The book is further enhanced by inspirational advice from successful contemporary black writers such as Bebe Moore Campbell, Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates, John Edgar Wideman, and others, a bibliography, and a guide to workshops, journals, magazines, contests, and fellowships supportive of black arts.

The African American Guide to Writing & Publishing Non Fiction

In college and graduate school, Jewell Parker Rhodes never encountered a single reading assignment or exercise that featured a person of color. Now she has made it her mission to rectify the situation, gathering advice and inspiring tips tailored for African Americans seeking to express their life experiences. Comprehensive and totally energizing, the African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction bursts with supportive topics such as: Finding your voice Getting to know your literary ancestors Overcoming a bruised ego and finding the determination to pursue your dreams Gathering material and conducting research Tapping sweet, bittersweet, and joyful memories Knowing when to keep revising, and when to let goThe guide also features unforgettable excerpts from luminaries such as Maya Angelou, Brent Staples, Houston Baker, and pointers from bestselling African American authors Patrice Gaines, E. Lynn Harris, James McBride, John Hope Franklin, Pearl Cleage, Edwidge Danticat, and many others. It is a uniquely nurturing and informative touchstone for affirming, bearing witness, leaving a legacy, and celebrating the remarkable journey of the self.