Breena Clarke grew up in Washington, D.C., and was educated at Webster College and Howard University. Her writings have appeared in the anthologies Contemporary Plays by Women of Color and Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience. She currently administers the Editorial Diversity Program at Time Inc. in New York City. She lives in New Jersey.

Stand the Storm: A Novel
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Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (July 28, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316007048
ISBN-13: 978-0316007047

"...illuminates and personalizes a dreadful part of our nation's past...a vivid view of slavery." (Booklist Michele Leber )

"Clarke's sensitivity and her lyrical, earthy narration bring a freshness to the somber subject matter." (Kirkus Reviews)

"[Clarke's] knowledge of the period and the novel's dense, deliberate narrative create a poignant story about the intricacies of human bondage and its dissolution, built around a family's unshakable faith in one another." (starred review,  Publishers Weekly)

Product Description
Even though Sewing Annie Coats and her son, Gabriel, have managed to buy their freedom, their lives are still marked by constant struggle and sacrifice. Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, where the Coatses operate a tailor's shop and laundry, is supposed to be a "promised land" for former slaves but is effectively a frontier town, gritty and dangerous, with no laws protecting black people.

The remarkable emotional energy with which the Coatses wage their daily battles-as they negotiate with their former owner, as they assist escaped slaves en route to freedom, as they prepare for the encroaching war, and as they strive to love each other enough-is what propels STAND THE STORM and makes the novel's tragic denouement so devastating.

River, Cross My Heart
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books; 1st Back Bay Pbk. Ed edition (October 14, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316899984

Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1999: Breena Clarke's first novel takes place in Georgetown in 1925, where a large and close-knit African American community took shape beneath the shadow of segregation. At the center of the story is baby Clara, who is swallowed by the Potomac as her sister, Johnnie Mae, cools off in the brackish water. It's the only place the girls can find relief--they're banned from the new, clean swimming pool the white kids use.
After Clara drowns, the river is never the same, and Johnnie Mae hovers on the edge of womanhood wondering if she'll be able to get past her guilt and emptiness. In an eloquent passage, Clarke writes, "Losing a loved one, a family member, is like losing a tooth. After a while, those teeth remaining shift and lean and spread out to split the distance between themselves and the other teeth still left, trying to close up spaces."

Bits of wisdom like this are the book's charm. Most remarkable are the church scenes, which Clarke renders almost purely in the give-and-take of voices: the booming preacher's sermon ("The people we love, we only borrowing them"), and the congregation's "Praise Jesus, Amen" exclamations. The author based her novel on stories passed down in Georgetown--tales of that area's first black churches, founded when people decided they wanted their own place of worship, and implicitly their own God. In church the novel takes flight. Elsewhere River, Cross My Heart suffers from clumsy, purple prose, and a plot that moves forward in labored fits and starts. Clarke painstakingly tries to re-create this past world, but sometimes it seems her duty to history is holding her back, bogging her down in period-piece details. In the effortless church scenes, history loses its gravity and is absorbed by grace. —Emily White

Black Silk: A Collection of African-American Erotica edited by Retha Powers
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Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (February 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446676918

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In the tradition of erotica collections like Erotique Noire and The Blue Light Corner.Black Silk is filled with lush, sexy stories featuring heroines who are overwhelmingly in control of their sexual lives and unabashed about their appetites. Representing a spectrum of styles and sexual perspectives, contributors to this collection include famed authors like Breena Clarke and Lolita Files as well as exciting new voices in the African American literary scene, including Carolyn Ferrell, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

About the Author
RETHA POWERS is an Executive Editor of the Quality Paperback Book Club. She has written articles for Essence, Glamour, Ms, and The New York Times Magazine and was recently profiled in Entertainment Weekly's top gay media figures.