Tracy Price-Thompson, a former Army 88N (Transportation) and 21B (Engineer Corp) is also a highly decorated Desert Storm veteran whose successful self-published novel, Black Coffee, was purchased as part of an unprecedented three-book deal by Random House imprint Villard/Strivers Row.

Ms. Price-Thompson’s writing credits also include, “Bensonhurst: Black and Then Blue” published in Children of the Dream: Our Stories of Growing Up Black in America , (Simon and Schuster, 1999) and “A Military Mom” published in Fortitude (Red Rock Press, 2000 ).

A Brooklyn, New York native and retired Army Engineer Officer, Tracy is an Alpha Delta Mu honor society graduate from Rutgers University, as well as a Ralph Bunche graduate fellow who holds degrees in Business Administration and Social Work.

Tracy is one half of the creative editorial team, TnT Explosions , a collaborative effort dedicated to quality editorial services and contributing creative literary projects to the reading public. Under the canopy of TnT Explosions, she has recently co-created, contributed to, and edited an anthology of contemporary short stories entitled, PROVERBS FOR THE PEOPLE.

Tracy lives in Hawaii with her wonderfully supportive husband and several of their six bright, beautiful, incredible children, and she is currently at work on her next novel.

Read the transcript of an on-line chat with Tracy Price-Thompson

Gather Together in My Name
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Atria; 1st Atria Books Trade Pbk. Ed edition (May 20, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416533044

"The BEST book I've read in the last 5 years!" —Shunda Leigh, Booking Matters Magazine

From the nationally bestselling and Hurston/Wright award-winning author Tracy Price-Thompson comes a heartbreaking story of loyalty and love that goes beyond the ultimate sacrifice.

Coming of age in the heart of crime-ridden Brooklyn, Shyne Blackwood is one in a set of triplets born into poverty and great tragedy. While his brothers are raised to seek a life of promise, Shyne's path veers early on. A street-seasoned hustler, he becomes known as a liar, a thief, and ultimately, a killer.

Personifying many of the negative stereotypes attributed to black men, Shyne is accused and convicted of the brutal murder of a child, and an entire city demands vengeance as he's sent to death row in a cold New York state prison.

On the eve of Shyne's execution, five people travel to Quincy Correctional Facility to witness the event. As the clock counts down to midnight, and while everyone has long since abandoned Shyne to his fate, a secret at the heart of this unthinkable crime remains to be discovered. It is a secret that will test the bonds of family, the strength of one man's character, and the redemptive power of a love worth dying for.

Other People's Skin: Four Novellas
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Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Atria (October 2, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416542078

In Other People's Skin, Tracy Price-Thompson and TaRessa Stovall, along with fellow authors Elizabeth Atkins and Desiree Cooper, take on one of the most controversial topics within the African-American community: the self-hatred caused by intra-racial prejudice and the ongoing obsession with skin tone and hair texture. In other words, the skin/hair thang among black women.

It begins with TaRessa Stovall's "My People, My People," in which a successful advertising executive acquires firsthand knowledge of prejudice when her clients insist on using light- rather than dark-skinned models. Next comes Tracy Price-Thompson's award-winning story "Other People's Skin," a tale set in 1970s Louisiana, where a dark-skinned young woman must come to terms with the bigotry of her light-skinned family. "New Birth," by Desiree Cooper reveals the intense roles that money, class, and skin color play in the intra-racial relationship between Catherine, a wealthy, light-skinned lawyer, and Lettie, her dark-skinned house cleaner. Finally, Elizabeth Atkin's "Take It Off" tells the story of a biracial girl who hides her coarse, braided hair from her friends at a mixed-race university in Detroit.

Other People's Skin is the most innovative and varied anthology of sisterhood and unity to date. Each novella entertains, challenges, and, most important, offers healing to the reader -- no matter what her race, skin tone, or state of mind.

Knockin' Boots
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ISBN: 0345477235
Format: Paperback, 352pp
Pub. Date: October 2005
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

THE SEX TOY...THE SELLOUT...THE DIVA...THE DOG

KEVIN LAWSON HAS A SECRET
This upstanding brother is drawn to seedy sex dens, adult bookstores, and kinky encounters with multiple partners. To hide his cravings from the world, Kevin uses his wife Fancy to solicit bedroom playmates and to indulge his ever-growing fantasies. Fantasies that threaten to cross some serious boundaries and leave a lot of lives in shambles.

A PREACHER'S DAUGHTER,
college graduate, and ex-club stripper, "Freak Nasty" Fancy Lawson has done it all and loved every moment of it. But now Fancy must face the truth of her husband's sexual addiction or risk losing the one constant in her ever-changing world.

Emile Pinchback is a BROTHAH WITH ISSUES
Especially when it comes to his bootylicious, ghetto-fabulous Nubian sistahs. He worships at the feet of the slender blond-haired Becky Ann, but when he's forced to look past her milky skin and into her heart, his racial stereotypes get busted wide open.

SASSY AND FULL OF BROOKLYN SPICE
Sparkle Henderson loves on the black hand side or not at all. Just a whiff of jungle fever can send her flying into a rage, but when she gets caught in a nasty web of sexual trickery. Sparkle surprises the world by finding love in a very strange place, and is forced to re-examine some of her long-held, die-hard beliefs.

 

A Woman's Worth
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ISBN: 0375506500
Format: Hardcover, 288pp
Pub. Date: March 2004
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.

Read an AALBC.com Review

Embracing the shattered pieces of the soul and championing the resilient nature of the heart, A Woman?s Worth takes readers on a journey of startling depth. From a speakeasy whorehouse in the bottoms of Alabama to a luxurious high-rise apartment in Kenya, acclaimed author Tracy Price-Thompson crosses boundaries of sexuality, gender, and culture to accentuate the core of black identity: the enormous strength of family.

Abeni Omorru is a stunning Kenyan woman who is haunted by piercing memories. Although her father?s wealth ensures her a life of prestige, childhood trauma has left her emotionally damaged and sexually promiscuous. While Abeni takes on many lovers, none come close to healing the wounds of her heart?and only a man who understands her worth can truly claim her soul.

Bishop Johnson is also haunted by his past. Raised by prostitutes in a rural Alabama town, he is a promising teenage boxer?until his dreams are shattered when his parents are murdered during a violent robbery and he takes revenge on the perpetrators. Bishop goes to jail, and when he is released he has a volatile temper and a mean left hook to back it up.

Trouble continues to find Bishop, and he is forced to leave Alabama and travel to Kenya with the Peace Corps. There he falls in love with Abeni, and they marry. When Bishop learns the secret of Abeni?s past, he is force to make a decision that may cost him more than one man should ever have to sacrifice.

Proverbs for People
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Tracy Price-Thompson and Taressa Stovall

ISBN: 0758202865
Format: Hardcover, 512pp
Pub. Date: June 2003
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation

If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing." "Don't start none, won't be none." "If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything." Whether it was in the church on a hard-shined wooden pew, or around the kitchen table after, listening to the wisdom of mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, friends, and leaders, the messages of the proverbs resonate in the souls of most African-Americans—a sweet refrain heard through striving, reaching, loving, and living. In this powerful collection of stories based on African, African-American, and Biblical proverbs, some of today's most exciting new African-American writers tackle the unifying themes, delicious wit and undeniable wisdom of the proverbs, making them sing for a whole new generation.

In the moving "Love Can Move Mountains," author Elizabeth Atkins Bowman explores the meaning of the African-American saying, "Mountain, get out of my way!" in a story about the miraculous, mysterious power of a mother's stand-firm love. In Arethia Hornsby's "My Momma Said…," two friends go out on the town and get schooled in a life lesson that proves the truth behind the ages-old African-American proverb, "Never judge a book by its cover." Town gossip gets the best of a loyal wife and gives credence to C.F. Pope's saying, "Never declare war unless you mean to do battle," in Gwynne Forster's wry tale of comeuppance, "First Thing Monday Morning." And in the flirty short story, "Something Special," Venise Berry shows what the Cape Verde Islands maxim, "Every week has its Friday" really means as one woman's weekly ritual promises seven days' worth of sensual satisfaction.

Black Coffee
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ISBN: 0375757775
Format: Paperback, 316pp
Pub. Date: January 2002
Publisher: Random House Adult Trade Publishing Group

 “I may be a supersoldier but I sure as hell ain’t no Superwoman. Yes, it’s true my hand is steady, I have the eye of a marksman, and I can hit a moving target dead center at four hundred meters, but when it comes to making clever love decisions, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. While I look pretty lofty in my spit-shined combat boots and razor-sharp battle dress uniform, like a lot of young sisters from the ’hood, I’ve taken a few wrong turns down the back alleys of life.”

Meet Sergeant Sanderella Coffee, who has just completed a three-year overseas tour and is now reporting to a military installation in Virginia. She is a single mother whose goal is to attend the Army’s prestigious Officer Candidate School, which will guarantee a better life for her and her children.

Sandie meets a man who matches her ambition and determination step for step in the form of Drill Sergeant Romulus Caesar, who literally marches into her life and turns it upside down. They fall in love, and Rom is everything Sandie could want—supportive, confident, self-reliant—but he’s also married. Because of the military’s tough policy on fraternization and adultery, Sandie could find her carefully orchestrated career slipping away like sand in a breeze.

Tracy is also anthologized in Twilight Moods along with Nancey Flowers (editor), Rochelle Alers, William Fredrick Cooper, Phill Duck, Lolita Files, Nancey Flowers, Tracy Grant, Marlon Green, Tracy Green, Linda Dominique Grosvenor, Joylynn M. Jossel, Timmothy B. McCann, Jacquie Bamberg Moore, Sandra A. Ottey, Courtney Parker, Eric E. Pete, Michael Presley and Leone D'Mitrienne Williams.

Twilight Moods
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"An explosive collection of some of the most sensual erotica from today’s hottest up and coming authors."
―E. Lynn Harris, A Love of My Own

"Literate and modern, Twilight Moods is the first anthology of erotica assembling some of today's most compelling new voices of contemporary fiction into one book. Impressively done."
―Mosaic magazine

Twilight Moods is the first independent novel to bring you stories from a dazzling array of today's hottest authors. Prepare yourself because your temperature will rise as Timmothy B. McCann gives it to you "Fuller, Deeper, Smoother" while Courtney Parker is "Holdin' It Down" on her end. Joylynn M. Jossel wants to know if you've been "Daydreaming at Night" and Sandra A. Ottey helps you start your workday with her "Blue-Collar Lover." Lolita Files spices up lunch with a little "Bobby Q's Sauce." Rochelle Alers steams up the evening with a hot and seductive "Anniversary."

These sensual narratives will make you "Twist" like Tracy Grant's story and bring you back to read them over and over. Whether you're in the mood day or night, whenever the time is right, pick up Twilight Moods and as Eric E. Pete says, "Please Come Again."

Proverbs For The People: Contemporary African-American Stories
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