Jervey Tervalon

Jervey Tervalon

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Photo Credit: Rick Mendoza

Jervey Tervalon is the author of All the Trouble You Need, Understand This, and the Los Angeles Times bestseller Dead Above Ground. An award-winning poet, screenwriter, and dramatist, Jervey was born in New Orleans, raised in Los Angeles, and now lives in Altadena, California, with his wife and two daughters.

The Cocaine Chronicles
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by Jervey Tervalon (Editor), Gary Phillips (Editor)

Paperback: 250 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (April 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1888451750
ISBN-13: 978-1888451757
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches

Nothing to snort at, this ambitious anthology of jaw-grinding criminal behavior is masterfully curated by acclaimed authors Phillips and Tervalon. Cocaine, that most troubling and fascinating of substances is the subject, the subtext, the whys and whereofs in The Cocaine Chronicles, a collection of original short stories that are funny and harrowing, sad and scary, but at all times riveting. The Cocaine Chronicles contains tough tales by a cross-section of today's most thought-provoking writers.

Contributors: Susan Straight, Lee Child, Laura Lippman, Ken Bruen, Jerry Stahl, Nina Revoyr, Bill Moody, Emory Holmes II, James Brown, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, Kerry E. West, Donnell Alexander, Deborah Vankin, Robert Ward, Manuel Ramos, and Detrice Jones.

Griots Beneath the Baobab: Tales from Los Angeles
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Randy Ross (Editor)

Paperback: 190 pages
Publisher: Larod Publishing Company (April 5, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0966267516
ISBN-13: 978-0966267518
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches

Griots Beneath the Baobab, the latest anthology published by International Black Writers and Artists of Los Angeles (IBWA-LA), honors the creative spirit of some of America's most insightful griots—by way of L.A. Griots features powerful stories by noted, award-winning, and best-selling writers Donald Bakeer, Octavia E. Butler, Wanda Coleman, Stanley Crouch, Eric Jerome Dickey, Sikivu Hutchinson, Silas Jones, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Gary Phillips, Randy Ross, Jervey Tervalon, and Ellery Washington.

Understand This (California Fiction)
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Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 2, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520223551
ISBN-13: 978-0520223554
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches

Jervey Tervalon's novel about young people in South Central Los Angeles grows out of his experience teaching in a high school there and his pain at the death of one of his favorite students.

Lita
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press (May 25, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743448855
ISBN-13: 978-0743448857
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches

In this sequel to his acclaimed "urban masterpiece" (The Philadelphia Inquirer), the national bestseller Dead Above Ground, Jervey Tervalon's unforgettable heroine, Lita Du Champ, is at loose ends, trying to hold house and home together. Ten years after she, her husband, their children, and her twin sisters moved to Los Angeles, the past comes back to haunt her. An unwelcome phone call reveals that Lita's estranged father is on his deathbed and that her aunt has seen Lita's beloved mother -- never mind that the woman has been dead for a decade. Overwhelmed by long-suppressed memories, Lita realizes that she must return to New Orleans to come to terms with her history, but as she makes the journey a growing sense of dread takes root in her soul. She's certain there will be no simple return to the life she led in Los Angeles.

All the Trouble You Need
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press (February 25, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743422392
ISBN-13: 978-0743422390
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches

Jervey Tervalon delivered "a marvelous read" (USA Today) in Dead Above Ground, his national bestselling novel of a troubled Southern family. Now his literary landscape shifts to the West Coast, in this compelling portrayal of a young black university professor living life on his own terms -- a life entangled in the complex relationships with the women who desire him.

All Jordan Davis wants is a smooth ride, speeding his Triumph along the 101, living the beautiful life among the beautiful people of Santa Barbara. But trouble seems to find him at every turn in the road. There's Trisha, the seductive twenty-two-year-old virgin from the glamorous foothills...Mary, the angry white girl whose defiance is a definite turn-on...and Daphne, an exotic, forbidden student, and keeper of shadowy secrets. They all want to define him, limit him, turn him into what they want him to be. But for Jordan, the ultimate question is what does he want out of life -- and can a man truly create a destiny that isn't defined by his race or his past?

Dead Above Ground
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Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press (January 1, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0671034693
ISBN-13: 978-0671034696
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches

That was Mother's life back then: planning one daughter's wedding while plotting to kill her other daughter's lover.... For feisty young Lita Du Champ, New Orleans is a place dominated by her hardworking family -- in particular, her strong-willed mother, Helen, who rules with an unshakable sense of propriety. Ever loyal to her mother, and adoring of her beautiful, restless, married sister Adele, Lita works hard to keep the family together as she attempts to establish her own life. But when Adele falls in love with Lucien Faure -- a smooth operator with "the devil's good looks" and a decades-old score to settle with Helen -- Lita unveils her mother's mysterious past to confront the Du Champs' long-buried secrets. Now, Lita finds she has one last and desperate chance to save the future of those she loves.

Award-winning author Jervey Tervalon draws from his own heritage -- and the twisting family story that has lived and breathed inside him his whole life -- to create a spellbindingly luminous novel of passion, murder, and vengeance.