Today marks the publication of my latest cover story, "Lit Up." It's a profile of the 27-year-old St. Louis author Keisha Ervin, starlet of a wildly popular category of fiction known as street lit.Never heard of the genre? Also known as urban fiction, urban lit and ghetto lit, it's one of the highest-circulating fiction categories at libraries all over the metro area, and sells like hotcakes at area bookstores such as the locally-owned Black Visions Books (9971 Lewis and Clark Boulevard) and Fir
A repertorial smorgasbord awaits this week in RFT. Writer Kristen Hinman gets the ball rolling with a story on the Liberation Christian Church, whose hip-hop "Soul Force" sermons has made for a unique worship experience every other Sunday on the Delmar Loop. You'll also want to take a look at "Diary of a Mad Man," by Keegan Hamilton. Here, Hamilton tells the bizarre story of Dennis Long, who, after failing to get us to write a story about him, went out and made his own ne
After dishing out a heavy scene or two in our street-lit excerpts #1 and #2, I thought I'd end the week with a lil' lighter passage. Today's choice comes from Keisha Ervin's third book, Mina's Joint. This novel was my favorite of all. It tells the story of Mina Matthews, an up-and-coming St. Louis hair stylist with lots of ambition. At the start of the book, Mina is engaged to one Andrew Wellington, the son of Mayor Andrew Wellington, Sr., who is running for Governor of Missouri. Andrew Jr. is a
One of the main things haters of street lit like to harp on is the super-graphic sex scenes. (Because tweens and teens devour this genre.) Keisha Ervin's books contain scads of sex scenes. In my current cover story, "Lit Up," she explains: "It's actually getting harder for me to write [them]. I've done so many, it's gotten to the point where I now save them for
the end." Ervin's novel Torn is a love story about St. Louisans Mo and Quan, who've been together for ten years but are obviously painfu
A fellow scribe at The Pitch, RFT's sister paper in Kansas City, this week tells the awesome story of Quentin Carter, a street-lit writer who picked up pen and paper while doing eight years in The Big House. The Pitch(St. Louis' street-lit scene, and its starlet Keisha Ervin, were featured in the April 14, 2009, feature story, "Lit Up.")KC's Carter was a prolific drug dealer by his late teens and went to the pen for eight years after getting caught with a kilo of crack during a rally for George
