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Jill Nelson was born and raised in Harlem and has been a working journalist for over twenty years. She is a graduate of the City College of New York and the Columbia School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, The Washington Post, The Nation, Ms., The Chicago Tribune and the Village Voice. Jill was a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine during its first years of existence, and was named Washington D.C. Journalist of the Year for her work there. She freelances and lectures widely, and writes a twice-monthly column, “On the Verge,” for NiaOnline.com and is a monthly contributor to the Op Ed page of USA Today. She was a professor of Journalism at the City College of New York from 1998 to 2003. Jill wrote the best-selling memoir, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience (Noble Press, hardcover, 1993 and Penguin, paperback, 1994) which won an American Book Award. She is the author of Straight, No Chaser: How I Became A Grown-Up Black Woman (Putnam, Fall 1997, Penguin, Winter 1999) and edited Police Brutality: An Anthology, for WW Norton, published in April 2000. Her first novel, Sexual Healing, was released in June 2003. Her latest book, the non-fiction Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island, was published in May 2005 by Random House.
Jill lectures widely on race, gender,
politics, media, writing and other topics. In 2006 she hosted a
writer’s workshop in her house on Martha’s Vineyard and a series
of one day writing workshops at her home in New York City.
The mother of an adult daughter, and
a grandmother, she lives in Harlem.
Hardcover: 288 pages
“With its sex-positive message and unapologetic emphasis on female enjoyment,
Nelson’s latest makes for a zingy beach read.”
ISBN: 0972456201
ISBN: 0393321630 In recent years, nothing has blotted the American imagination so starkly as the highway beating of Rodney King, the shooting of the unarmed and innocent Amadou Diallo, and the savage torture of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn precinct's bathroom. While many white Americans were shocked by these naked abuses of official police power, many more black Americans greeted news of these transgressions with an unfazed bewilderment. No one disputes the fact that police brutality is an immense problem, yet never before has it been properly examined and addressed. With Police Brutality, Jill Nelson, author of the best-selling memoir Volunteer Slavery, has pioneered a work of immense social importance. What causes police brutality? Why has opposition to it grown so suddenly intense? What does it tell us about racism in America at the turn of the century? The contributors--academics, fiction writers, and professionals--offer unique, incisive, and occasionally iconoclastic interpretations of police brutality. Nelson includes a description of a New York race riot of 1900, placing police brutality in a desperately needed historical and intellectual context. Stanley Crouch argues it as yet another political straw man divisive of America's racial consciousness. Claude Clegg III presents a brilliant history of the FBI's sinister surveillance of the Nation of Islam. Arthur Doyle, a black detective who worked on the streets of New York City for over thirty years, describes chilling instances of hazing by his fellow white officers, allowing us to understand, as never before, the psychological roots of the problem. Flores Forbes relates how an instance of childhood degradation at the hands of San Diego police would bear grim fruit in membership in the Black Panther Party. Distinguished legal scholar Derrick Bell's passionate disquisition on the small humiliations many officers regularly visit upon young black men, interracial couples, and black professionals like himself--instances that only rarely make the front page--offers a disturbing window on the pervasiveness of police brutality in the black community. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley and Nation columnist Patricia Williams offer their characteristically incisive voices as to what, in the wake of the most recent outrages, we as a nation might do next. A work that is destined to see wide use in classrooms across the country--whether in history, African American studies, sociology, or law enforcement courses--Police Brutality refuses merely to inflame or outrage. No wound to America's racial consciousness has festered untreated for quite so long, and never before have so many prominent voices come together to form such a crucial contribution to eradicating police brutality from American life.
ISBN: 014023716X When Jill Nelson became the first black woman to write for The Washington Post's prestigious Sunday magazine in 1986, she thought she had entered journalism heaven. Instead, she discovered that life at The Post meant walking "the thin line between Uncle Tomming and Mau-Mauing" - between holding onto her job and preserving her soul. As Nelson recounts her harrowing four years at The Post - along with her odyssey from a middle-class childhood to near poverty, divorce and single motherhood, flame-out love affairs, and a nervous breakdown - she gives us a scalding expose of the racial, sexual, and corporate politics of one of our most respected newspapers. Volunteer Slavery is a funny, fiercely candid book that names names and takes no prisoners.
ISBN: 0140277242 The face of journalism was forever changed after Jill Nelson came along. Volunteer Slavery, the memoir and explosive exposé of her experiences in the white, male-dominated world of The Washington Post, served as a wake-up call to all Americans and placed Nelson at the forefront of the African American political arena. Now, the bestselling author is back with Straight, No Chaser, a call to arms written in an effort to "look at the sum of [black women's] lives beyond the how-to-snag-a-man, am-I-pretty-enough and how's-my-hair concerns that dominate [their] daily existence." Nelson encourages black women—especially young girls—to develop a positive identity in the face of adversity and to look critically at their role models, many of whom she believes send mixed messages to the African American community. From Barbie to bra burning, Mike Tyson to the Million Man March, Nelson takes a personal and thoughtful approach to the empowerment of the black female.
Related Links
Official Website
JILL NELSON: BEACH HOUSE MEMORIES
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