Tina McElroy Ansastories and essays have appeared in several recent anthologies.
She lives
with her husband, Jon�e Ansa, on St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia.
Ansa was born in Macon, GA, the youngest of five children. In
1971, she graduated from Spelman College, the historically black women's college
which is part of the Atlanta University Center in Atlanta, GA. Her first job
after college was on the copy desk of The Atlanta Constitution, where she
was the first black woman to work on the morning newspaper. During her eight
years at The Atlanta Constitution, she worked as copy editor, makeup
editor, layout editor, entertainment writer, features editor, and news reporter.
She also worked as editor and copy editor for The Charlotte (NC) Observer.
Since 1982, she has been a freelance journalist, newspaper columnist and writing
workshop instructor at Brunswick College, Emory University and Spelman College.
(Excerpted www.harpercollins.com,
Photo by Jon�e Ansa)
Paperback: 284 pages
Publisher:
DownSouth Press (July 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0979954312
ISBN-13: 978-0979954313
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
Best-Selling author Tina McElroy Ansa returns with her signature
ability to tell a good, quirky story and tell it with humor,
grace and great respect for the power of the particular (The New
York Times Book Review) with her new novel TAKING AFTER MUDEAR.
TAKING AFTER MUDEAR, Ansa s fifth novel, is the superbly crafted
sequel to her award winning best-seller, UGLY WAYS. And it is the
book fans have been waiting for.
Bestselling author Tina McElroy
Ansa discusses her long awaited new novel and her new publishing
house, DownSouth Press.
Jill McCorkle calls UGLY WAYS, an absolute
beauty...that crackles and sings with life. And although, as
TAKING AFTER MUDEAR opens, the matriarch of the Lovejoy family
has been dead for months, she and Ansa s newest novel again
crackle and sing with life. TAKING AFTER MUDEAR continues to
follow the story of the three Lovejoy sisters and their mother
Mudear, who is deceased but refuses to die, in the small Georgia
town of Mulberry. The baby of the family, Annie Ruth, -- pretty,
unmarried and hugely pregnant with the first Lovejoy grandchild
-- has moved back to Mulberry and is living with her big sister,
Betty, a prosperous businesswoman. The middle girl, Emily, who
claims she has taken a leave of absence from her job in Atlanta,
has moved in, too, to help out and mostly raise the level of
sibling tension and friction.
But just as the girls begin to think things
have settled down for them, Mudear, their recently deceased,
self-centered, self-focused mother, starts to make her presence
felt again. And with the birth of Annie Ruth s baby girl, the
fragile Lovejoy family situation begins to totter even more.
With each piece of evidence that something otherworldly and
strange is indeed still hanging around the Lovejoy household,
the sisters suspect more and more that they are being haunted by
their mother. With various baby s daddies showing up and
Lovejoys having signature meltdowns, things soon escalate into a
full-flown supernatural Mulberry battle for the very life of the
newborn child. Indeed, Mudear has come back for that baby girl!!
And the sisters have to discover if they are merely the Lovejoy
girls ( Them girls still got some ugly ways about em! Mudear is
fond of muttering.) or truly the Lovejoy women!!
Format: Hardcover, 336pp. ISBN: 006019779X Publisher: William Morrow & Co Pub. Date: April 2002 Edition Desc: 1 ED
I am hoping
that You Know Better will offer readers a safe place to talk about
our children. Whether or not you identify with Lily or Sandra or
LaShawndra or the men in the novel my hope for you my readers is that You
Know Better gives you a place to continue the mighty and important
discussion about our children. �Tina McElroy Ansa
Written with power, wisdom, and humor, this touching novel explores the
inexhaustible passion that fuels familial ties.
It is the spring weekend of the Peach Blossom Festival in the tiny
middle Georgia town of Mulberry, but things are far from sweet for the
Pines women. LaShawndra, an eighteen-year-old hoochie mama who wants
nothing more out of life than to dance in a music video, has messed
up...again. But this time she isn't sticking around to hear about it. She
plans instead to hitchhike out of Mulberry with her arms wrapped around
some handsome stranger on a motorcycle -- avoiding repercussions for her
actions.
Not that her mother seems to care; after all, Sandra is busy working on
her flourishing real-estate career and on a tenuous relationship with the
local minister. It's LaShawndra's grandmother, Lily Paine Pines, a former
schoolteacher, principal, school-board administrator, and highly respected
cornerstone of the Mulberry community, who is out scouring the streets at
midnight looking for her granddaughter.
Over the course of one weekend these three disparate women, guided by
the wisdom of three unexpected visitors -- the ghosts of Miss Moses, Nurse
Joanna Bloom, and Miss Elizabeth Dryer -- will learn to face the pain of
their lives and discover that with reconciliation comes the healing they
all desperately seek. In this magical, deeply resonant novel, Tina McElroy
Ansa goes straight to the heart of women's relationships to reveal the
indestructible soul that bonds us all.
Ansa's third novel. First
published in October of 1996 by Doubleday. This is the beautifully erotic
love story of Lena McPherson and the 100-year old ghost -- Herman -- she
calls up to love and cherish her. The novel was awarded the Georgia
Authors Series Award for 1996. Ms. Ansa also won this same award for her
debut novel, Baby in the Family, and is the only two-time winner of
the honor.
In The Hand I Fan With, Ansa returns to the fictional small town of
Mulberry, Georgia, where her previous two bestselling novels, Baby of the
Family and Ugly Ways, were set. Filled with eccentric and terminally nosy
folks, Mulberry is a vibrant community whose leading citizen is the
extraordinary Lena McPherson. With the death of Lena's parents in a plane
crash ten years earlier, she has become the one on whom everyone in
Mulberry depends - she's the hand they fan with. Now forty-five, Lena's
beginning to weary of shouldering everyone's problems. And her material
wealth gives her no emotional sustenance. Desperate for love and
companionship, she and a friend perform a supernatural ritual to conjure
up a man for Lena. She gets one all right: a ghost named Herman who,
though dead for one hundred years, is all man. His love changes Lena's
life forever, satisfying as never before her physical and spiritual needs.
Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 277pp. ISBN: 0156000776 Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company Pub. Date: December 1994
Ansa's
second novel. The African-American Blackboard List named the novel
Best Fiction in 1994. Ms. Ansa was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in
1994 for Ugly Ways and the novel was on the African-American
Best-sellers/Blackboard List for more than two years. Award-winning
actress Alfre Woodard has entered into a partnership with Ms. Ansa to
bring Ugly Ways to the screen.
Three sexy, screwed-up Southern sisters come home to Mulberry to put
their totally self-centered mother, Mudear, in her grave. We meet the Lovejoy women as
they gather in their mother's house to lay her and the demons she has dumped on them to
rest.
Mudear Lovejoy was the kind of mother who ruled her house and raised her daughters with
an iron hand-even after her "change." Betty is her oldest daughter, big-boned
and strong, the only one who remembers what Mudear was like before The Change. Emily is
the middle child, restless and divorced, the one who everyone assumed would be the first
after Mudear to crack. The youngest is wild Annie Ruth, a TV anchorwoman who is pregnant
out of wedlock and plagued by visions of menacing cats. Ernest, their father, is a kaolin
mine worker who is so overwhelmed by all the females around him that sometimes he just
wants to yell out, "Womens taking over my house!"
As the sisters reminisce, they are unaware that even though Mudear's body is laid out
in Parkinson Funeral Home, she is not so easily buried. Her spirit refuses to die, and she
floats around Mulberry, watching her daughters stretched out on her porch smoking
cigarettes, drinking her husband's liquor from her best glasses, and talking about
marijuana like "some damn black girl hippies."
In alternating voices, each member of the Lovejoy family tells us what preys on his or
her mind. As they prepare for the memorial, sit up with the body, and at the funeral
itself, each must come to grips with her relationship to Mudear. At the same time, each
must define what a mother, a black mother--their mother--is.
Child at the moment of her birth, with the power to see ghosts and
predict the future. But only one nurse knows the spells to ensure that
Lena will see good ghosts, not evil ones.
Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Baby of the Family
was also on the African-American Bestseller List for Paperback Fiction. In
October 2001, Baby of the Family was chosen by the Georgia Center
for the Book as one of the Top 25 Books Every Georgian Should Read. The
book also won both the American Library Association Best Book for Young
Adults in 1990 Award, and won the 1989 Georgia Authors Series Award. She
and her husband, AFI (American Film Institute) Fellow filmmaker Jonee Ansa,
are currently adapting Baby of the Family for the screen as a
feature film starring Alfre Woodard, Ruby Dee, Loretta Devine, Sheryl Lee
Ralph, Cylk Cozart, Vanessa Williams, Todd Bridges, Pam Grier, and Tonea
Stewart. The author is collaborating with her husband on the screenplay
for Baby of the Family, which he will direct and shoot in summer
2002 in Macon, GA. Ms. Ansa is executive producer. Patrice Rushen is the
film's composer.
Taking
After Mudear
You
Know Better 
The
Hand I Fan With
Ugly
Ways
Baby
of the Family
Tina McElroy Ansa Official Web site