Jill Nelson

Jill Nelson

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Jill Nelson
Photo: Coreen Simpson

Nelson is he author of the best selling book Volunteer Slavery, which won an American Book Award, and Straight, No Chaser, and the editor of the anthology Police Brutality. She is a regular contributor to the Village Voice and MSNBC.com, and her work has appeared in Essence, the New York Times, the Nation, The New York Review of Books, and USA Today, amoung other publications. She teaches at the City College of New York and lives in Harlem. Sexual Healing is Jill Nelson's first novel.
Bio Source: Agate Publishing

Sexual Healing
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ISBN: 0972456201
Format: Hardcover, 318pp
Pub. Date: June 2003
Publisher: Agate Publishing, Incorporated

"Lydia Beaucoup and Acey Allen are two childhood friends who've grown up to become successful mid-career professionals. But having reached forty, their career success is matched by their romantic and sexual dissatisfactions. They hatch a plan to turn the world's oldest profession on its head: why not develop a new business aimed at meeting the intimate needs of black women, in an environment that's discreet, safe, and most important, completely focused on their pleasure? Thus is born the idea for A Sister's Spa - a "full-service" facility that supplies handsome black men willing and able to fulfill their clientele's every desire. Launching the enterprise is a struggle even as their delighted customer base grows, they face attacks from grandstanding church and community leaders, hostile media, and other conniving parties." From the most dignified black church in Oakland to the racks of Loehmann's to the skyscraping executive suites of San Francisco, Sexual Healing is a comedy of outraged manners for the 21st century, a penetrating examination of sexual and racial politics, and a hilariously frank and forthright exploration of what women really want.

Police Brutality: An Anthology
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ISBN: 0393321630
Format: Paperback, 320pp
Pub. Date: April 2001
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

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.

Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
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ISBN: 014023716X
Format: Paperback, 244pp
Pub. Date: June 1994
Publisher: Viking Penguin

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.

Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman
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ISBN: 0140277242
Format: Paperback, 226pp
Pub. Date: February 1999
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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.