Breena Clarke
Breena Clarke's fourth novel, ALIVE NEARBY, is an epistolary novel that weaves back stories of characters from ANGELS MAKE THEIR HOPE HERE (July 2014), her sweeping novel about an imagined mixed-race community, and brings them and their stories into the 21st century. Breena is the author of two historical novels set in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Her debut novel, RIVER, CROSS MY HEART (1999), was an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection. Clarke’s critically reviewed second novel, STAND THE STORM, is set in mid-19th century Washington, D.C., and was chosen by the Washington Post Book Review as one of the 100 best for 2008. Breena Clarke is co-author with Glenda Dickerson of the play "Re/Membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show" and is an advisor to the board of A Room Of Her Own Foundation. She has served on the fiction faculty of The Stonecoast MFA program at The University of Southern Maine. Her short fiction has appeared online at Kweli, The Nervous Breakdown, Catapult, and others. She is co-editor of Chicken Soup For The Soul I’m Speaking Now: Black Women Share Their Truth in 101 Stories of Love, Courage, and Hope. She is a co-founder and organizer of The Hobart Festival of Women Writers since 2013 and is an editor of HFWW’s online journal, NOW.
“Only a teaspoon of self-pity, girl. Every day give yourself a teaspoonful, but only a teaspoonful. Fill it up full, but only once! Don’t let yourself have more. You can’t live off it. But just a bit of it is like a tonic.”
“But comes a time for a woman when she stops thinking of herself as a girl, as a person of possibilities. She starts looking at the plain facts of herself. Her body that’s become the body that she has and her habits becoming the habits that she’s written in stone. Her “haves” being the ones she’s got and maybe not getting anymore.”
“Try more things. Cross some lines.”
“With these coming children we never relinquish the past. We keep seeing somebody gone in each new one.”