Street Lit RapUp
The underbelly of the contemporary African-American experience is a source of high drama. Raw, gritty, sexual, and streetwise, Street Lit is an emerging fiction genre that is proving to be extremely successful with its readers. A true grassroots phenomenon, this genre was spearheaded by self-published authors drawing on their own life stories. Today's Street Lit is published by increasingly successful independent houses, plus some major publishers' imprints and distributed lines.
Street Lit is not for every library; some communities may find the language and plot situations objectionable. On the other hand, those libraries that serve urban African-American patrons will find it essential to their collections. “We can’t keep it on the shelves. It just flies out of here, and our circulation has gone way up ever since we’ve been buying a lot of it,” observes Anni Broughton of Detroit Public Library. “We have patrons who read nothing else, and having it available really keeps them coming to the library.”
Your patrons want the latest titles in this popular fiction genre, but selecting titles can be challenging. Ingram offers Street Lit RapUp, a quarterly e-mail alert which showcases forthcoming Street Lit titles. To sign up, e-mail us at ExperienceIt@ingrambook.com. Please be sure to include your name, e-mail address, and Ingram account number.
Lists of new and backlist Street Lit titles are also available on ipage: click the Collection Development tab, then Adult Books & Audiobooks, then African-American Resources. |
