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Tina McElroy Ansa stories and essays have appeared in several recent anthologies. She lives with her husband, Jonée 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 Jonée Ansa)
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 You
Know Better Click to order via Amazon Format: Hardcover, 336pp. 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.
Format: Paperback, 480pp. 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. 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.
Format: Paperback, 276pp. 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. |
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Related Links
Tina McElroy Ansa Official Web site
Book cover and text taken from the liner jacket of Ansa's novel
"Ugly Ways" |
The
Hand I Fan With
Ugly
Ways
Baby
of the Family
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