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Pop Star: Sharon Flake

Abby Mendelson Wednesday, July 11, 2007

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Then there was the e-mail that Sharon Flake got from an Alabama high-school librarian. Seemed that all these teenaged white boys were reserving her 1998 young-adult book The Skin I’m In – and why was that? Skin -- something about sex, maybe?

A peek inside told her that this tale of a misfit black girl struck a chord with all adolescents, who generally see themselves as outsiders.

Talk about your mojo working. Spin a half-dozen books around similar themes – trying to belong, trying to see past the obvious into a deeper part of life – win a fistful of awards, make yourself required reading in middle-school, high-school, and college curricula, then sell a half-million books. “It adds up,” Sharon Flake says. “It’s a lot of books. I try not to think about it.”

What she does think about is how her novels have found multiple audiences – not only young women of color, who are the protagonists, but also people of all ages and races, literally 10 to 70, even book clubs. “They’re all connecting at the same place,” she says. “Especially kids. My books are fast reads about their world. There’s a vulnerability in my characters that kids can connect to. My characters very direct and blunt – and are kids, too.”

Born in North Philadelphia, Flake was never a writer in high school. “I didn’t think I had talent,” she shrugs. Coming to Pitt, for medicine, she switched to writing. After working with troubled youth she came back to the university, working public relations. “They believed me when I said I knew how to write press releases,” she smiles.

Spurred by an article in Essence magazine, she began to write a young adult novel – “in spite of myself,” she says. “I have a tendency to jump in the water and then realize I need to know how to swim.”

Finding a publisher, The Skin I’m In came out in 1998, won awards, found an audience. “I knew where I was on the planet,” she says. “It was a revelation.”

Four years later she followed with Money Hungry, then Begging for Change, Who Am I Without Him?, and Bang!. Flake’s latest, The Broken Bike Boy and the Queen of 33rd Street, just published, is about a 10-year-old girl who learns to be nice as she tells people she lives in a castle. And so she does. “When people see Homewood they don’t see queens living in castles,” Flake says. “But the inner city is not all about broken glass. There’s crystal goblets, too. That’s what my books do -- put the broken glass and the crystal goblets in the same context.”

Working from her modest Stanton Heights home, Flake gives talks all around country –in ’06 alone she was in 11 states. “I live between royalty checks and speakers fees,” she says – and fends off questions about moving from Pittsburgh. “People say, ‘when are you going to leave?’ I say, ‘why? I like it here. Why would I want to go anywhere?’”

Abby Mendelson is the author of numerous books, including Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, which is available at amazon and bn.com.