From The Hollywood Reporter: Author Austin Channing Brown on lessons ‘I Am Still Here‘ memoir teaches amid current racial justice movement…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Austin Channing Brown was fired from her job when she found the desire to write a book.

“I had a conversation with an editor at a publishing house and said, ‘I really want to write a book about navigating whiteness from a Black woman’s perspective that isn’t rooted in the ‘hood, it’s not sensational. I didn’t dodge a bullet. I didn’t suddenly meet white people. I’ve just been around white people my whole life and I want to write a book about that,'” Channing Brown tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The author now recalls how her editor essentially nixed the concept: “She said to me, ‘Austin, I understand, but because you’re not famous, no one will read it. No one will read that memoir.'”

That editor was later proved wrong as Channing Brown, who began her professional career working in the nonprofit sector, continued to write on her personal blog, and soon caught the attention of editors hoping to publish her work. At the time, poignant tales and perspectives from Black authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay were “hugely successful.”

“I think there was a new era of proving to the publishing world that people do want our stories. So I started working on my proposal all over again and, at that time, 10 publishing companies offered for the book,” Channing Brown recalls.

Channing Brown’s book, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Convergent Books) would eventually be published in May 2018, but, to her surprise, two years later the book saw a whole new wave of success.

Read full post on The Hollywood Reporter