Literary Fiction – Dancing With Langston
Literary Fiction
Date Published: November 2019
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Carrie, a business manager who always wanted to be a dancer, has two commitments today. She made a promise to her late father to move Cousin Ella, a former Paris café dancer, from her condemned Harlem apartment to a safe place. She’s also committed to catch a flight to Seattle with her husband for his new job. But Cousin Ella resists leaving the apartment where she’s had salons with Langston Hughes. She also has a mysterious gift that she wants Carrie to earn. If she does, a revelation about Carrie’s father and his cousin Langston Hughes will change her life.
Dancing with Langston has been chosen as an Adult Multicultural Fiction finalist in Foreword Reviews’ 2019 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
Praise for Dancing with Langston:
“Its details exquisite and its characters compelling, Dancing with Langston is a powerful novel about the rewards and the realities of following one’s dreams.” –5 stars, Foreword Clarion Review
“Dancing with Langston is one of the most beautiful, brilliant debut novels I’ve had the pleasure of reading in years. With a poet’s skill, and decades of historically important experience in publishing, Sharyn Skeeter has crafted a story that generously delivers black American history and culture, humor, a cast of vibrant, memorable characters, and a vivid portrait of one of the world’s most celebrated literary artists, Langston Hughes, who just happens to be her distant relative. But of even greater importance for this reader, her novel-—very original, very fresh, very dramatic—is a deeply moving story about the love of a daughter for a complex father she comes to fully know only after he is gone. It is about the importance of family—the ones we are born into and the ones we create and love during our journey through life. And about something we all have felt profoundly in our depths—the necessity and difficulty of following one’s dreams.” —Dr. Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
About the Author
Sharyn Skeeter is a writer, poet, editor, and educator. She was fiction/poetry/book review editor at Essence and editor in chief at Black Elegance magazine. She’s taught at Emerson College, University of Bridgeport, Fairfield University, and Gateway and Three Rivers community colleges. She participated in panel discussions and readings at universities in India and Singapore. Sharyn Skeeter has published magazine articles. Her poetry and fiction are in journals and anthologies. She lives in Seattle where she’s a trustee at ACT Theatre.
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Once a New York City lawyer, Marie Benedict had long dreamed about a fantastical job unraveling the larger mysteries of the past as an archaeologist or historian — before she tried her hand at writing. While drafting her first book, she realized that she could excavate the possible truths lurking in history through fiction, and has done so in THE OTHER EINSTEIN, the story of Mileva Maric, Albert Einstein’s first wife and a physicist herself, and CARNEGIE’S MAID, the story of a brilliant woman who may have spurred Andrew Carnegie toward philanthropy. Her new novel, THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM, was released in January of 2019. She is a graduate of Boston College and the Boston University School of Law, and lives in Pittsburgh with her family.
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