Porter, Connie Rose

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Connie Rose Porter

Personal

Born c. 1959, in New York, NY. Education: State University of New York at Albany, B.A., 1981; Louisiana State University, M.F.A., 1987.

Addresses

Home—Virginia Beach, VA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Pleasant Company Publications, 8400 Fairway Pl., Middleton, WI 53562.

Career

Writer. Taught at Milton Academy; instructor of creative writing at Emerson College and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Awards, Honors

Bread Loaf Writers' Conference fellowship; regional winner, Granta Best Young American Novelists competition; New York Times Notable Book designation, for All-Bright Court.

Writings

NOVELS

All-Bright Court, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1991.

Imani All Mine, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1998.

"AMERICAN GIRLS" SERIES

Meet Addy: An American Girl (also see below), illustrated by Melodye Rosales, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1993.

Addy Learns a Lesson: A School Story (also see below), illustrated by Melodye Rosales, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1993.

Addy's Surprise: A Christmas Story (also see below), illustrated by Melodye Rosales, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1993.

Happy Birthday, Addy!: A Springtime Story (also see below), illustrated by Bradford Brown, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1993.

Changes for Addy: A Winter Story (also see below), illustrated by Bradford Brown, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1994.

Addy Saves the Day: A Summer Story (also see below), illustrated by Bradford Brown, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1994.

High Hopes for Addy, illustrated by John Thompson and Dahl Taylor, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1999.

Addy's Little Brother, illustrated by Gabriela Dellosso and Dahl Taylor, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 2000.

Addy's Wedding Quilt, illustrated by Dahl Taylor, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 2001.

Addy's Story Collection (contains Meet Addy; Addy Learns a Lesson; Addy's Surprise; Happy Birthday, Addy!; Addy Saves the Day; and Changes for Addy), illustrated by Dahl Taylor, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 2001.

Addy Studies Freedom, illustrated by Dahl Taylor, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 2002.

Addy's Summer Place, illustrated by Dahl Taylor, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 2003.

Adaptations

Addy Learns a Lesson was adapted as a play, Friendship and Freedom, by Valerie Tripp and published in Addy's Theater Kit: A Play about Addy for You and Your Friends to Perform, Pleasant Company (Middleton, WI), 1994.

Sidelights

Connie Rose Porter is the author of All-Bright Court and Imani All Mine, two critically acclaimed novels that examine the lives of black families in America.

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Porter has also written several books about Addy Walker, a character from Pleasant Company's popular "American Girls" historical series, including High Hopes for Addy and Addy Studies Freedom.

Porter grew up in Lackawanna, New York, the second youngest of nine children. As a girl, she enjoyed reading books by Lois Lenski and Beverly Cleary, but in her teen years Porter became interested in the works of African-American authors, such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Nikki Giovanni, Richard Wright, Louise Meriwether, Rosa Guy, and Maya Angelou. During this time she also penned her first serious literary efforts. As the author recalled to Shannon Maughan on KidsRead.com, "I really started writing when I was fourteen years old and my parents gave me a typewriter. It was a very big sacrifice for them at the time, since we had nine kids and did not have a lot of money. I started writing poetry—very bad poetry, but you have to start somewhere."

After graduating from Buffalo City Honors High School, Porter attended the State University of New York at Albany, earning a bachelor's degree in English in 1981. She graduated from Louisiana State University in 1987 with a master's degree in creative writing. In addition to her writing, Porter has taught at Milton Academy, Emerson College, and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

Published First Novel

In 1991 Porter released her debut novel All-Bright Court. Based on a short story the author wrote as a student at Louisiana State University, All-Bright Court concerns a group of southern blacks who move to a northern steel town in search of higher-paying jobs, better living conditions, and a more egalitarian society. Faced with frequent layoffs and cruel and dangerous working conditions inside the mill in which they work, however, they find they have only traded one set of hardships for another. Yet a strong sense of community pervades the lowrent apartment complex where the novel is set, and, through vignettes centering on the Taylor family and their friends and neighbors, Porter depicts the many facets of poverty in an American ghetto. Adrian Oktenberg, reviewing the book for the Women's Review of Books, called All-Bright Court "a novel of vision and integrity, wherein a community is seen whole, embedded in its economics and history, sparing nothing, and whose stories are told with great compassion."

The main story centers around Samuel Taylor, who has dreamed since boyhood of escaping Tupelo, Mississippi. With no education, Samuel moves to Lackawanna, New York, and finds a job at Capital Steel. He joins the steelworkers' labor union and diligently saves money so that he can send for his girlfriend, Mary Kate, despite the fact that a longer-than-expected strike causes him to go hungry. Two years later, Samuel marries Mary Kate and brings her to All-Bright Court, the company-supplied housing named for the multi-colored paints applied to the tenement facades to prevent them from crumbling.

Samuel and Mary Kate struggle in poverty with their fellow neighbors, forming a community of transplanted Southerners in the shadow of Capital Steel. The winters blow cold, the sulfur smells, the snow piles high, silvery bits of steel from the mill rain down, and the sewers back up into the yards. The Taylors cling to their Southern values, superstitious beliefs, and distrust of whites, even as they reject some of their neighbors's attitudes as "country." They politely attempt to mind their own business, but Samuel and Mary Kate are inextricably bound to their community and, by shared circumstances, to all black Americans.

After posting a high score on an intelligence test, one of the Taylors' sons, Mikey, is offered a scholarship to a private school and a possible way out of the cycle of poverty and degradation in which his family is trapped. When his new friends expose him to their world, Mikey takes on the speech and values of affluent white culture and becomes ashamed of his family and the way they live. Jonathan Yardley commented in the Washington Post Book World that "Porter is sensitive to every nuance of the cultural encounter Mikey undergoes, and portrays each step of his journey with as much clarity as sympathy."

Porter earned praise for her depiction of both the desperation of the lives of her characters as well as the dignity inherent in their manner of coping. Gary Krist remarked in the Hudson Review that she "writes simply but powerfully, and with a command of detail that lends authority to the world she depicts." New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani noted that, "Though her prose is often lyrical, even poetic, [Porter] does not shirk from showing the reader the harsh reality of her characters' daily lives…. Indeed, the emotional power of All-Bright Court resides in her finely rendered characters, people who come alive for the reader as individuals one has known firsthand."

Pens Saga of a Young Slave

In 1993 Porter released Meet Addy: An American Girl, the first book in an historical series that features a young black slave who escapes to freedom with her mother during the American Civil War. "I wanted children to see African-American people as part of strong, loving families, caught up in slavery, doing what they had to do to survive," Porter noted on the Children's Literature Web site. In Addy Learns a Lesson, the title character faces the challenges of living in the urban North and finding friends at her school. Addy possesses "affability and pluck," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, who found the series of novels "bright" and "poignant." Discussing the significance of the "Addy" series with Maughan on KidsRead.com, Porter stated, "I want children to see that it is important to be connected to the past. With Addy, I'm glad that I've helped children see history come alive."

A Story of Life on the Streets

After producing several more works in the "American Girls" series, Porter addressed a more mature audience with her next publication, the 1998 novel Imani All Mine. While Tasha, her protagonist, is only a teenager, she has not experienced an average childhood. An honors student, Tasha plans to go to college and thereby escape the hardships of life in a poor inner-city neighborhood. But she becomes pregnant after being raped by a schoolmate and decides to keep her baby, whom she names Imani, meaning "faith." Tasha loves her child very deeply and tries to nurture her in a dangerous environment filled with drugs, gangs, poverty, and bigotry. She struggles to be a good mother while she deals with more common teen issues, including her emerging sexuality and her mother's new, white boyfriend.

If you enjoy the works of Connie Rose Porter

If you enjoy the works of Connie Rose Porter, you may also want to check out the following books:

Gary Paulsen, Nightjohn, 1993.

Nikki Grimes, Bronx Masquerade, 2002.

Angela Johnson, The First Part Last, 2003.

Tasha serves as an effective narrator, speaking in the language of the street, noted reviewers. Critic Karen Anderson applauded the author's creation in a Library Journal review, saying that Porter "gives Tasha great wisdom, grace, charm, and a moving poetic voice." Booklist's Vanessa Bush called Imani All Mine a "deceptively simple novel" and, like Anderson, remarked that "through Tasha's stark voice, Porter offers well-drawn characters." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found that while the book sometimes possesses a "[young adult] simplicity," this is because Porter "spins the tale in a series of flashbacks, telling Tasha's story in a nonlinear fashion and with a bold dialect, mirroring the survival strategies of indirection that Tasha employs."

Discussing her literary style on the Houghton Mifflin Web site, Porter remarked: "I would describe myself as a black female writer." She continued, "I do not fear that because there is some descriptive tag before the word 'writer' that I will be pigeonholed. Racism and sexism are what can pigeonhole you. They can limit, even stop you. Not describing myself as a black woman will not prevent that from happening."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 70, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

PERIODICALS

American Libraries, February, 1992, p. 192.

Belles Lettres, winter, 1991, p. 7.

Booklist, August, 1993, p. 2063; January 1, 1999, Vanessa Bush, review of Imani All Mine, p. 834; April 1, 2000, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Imani All Mine, p. 1449.

Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1991, p. 4.

Detroit Free Press, September 8, 1991, p. 8P.

Essence, September, 1991, p. 50; May, 1999, p. 90.

Hudson Review, spring, 1992, Gary Krist, review of All-Bright Court, pp. 141-142.

Library Journal, February 1, 1999, Karen Anderson, review of Imani All Mine, p. 122; November 1, 2000, review of All-Bright Court, p. 168.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 13, 1991, p. 9; September 6, 1992, p. 11.

New Yorker, September 9, 1991, p. 96.

New York Times, September 10, 1991, Michiko Kakutani, review of All-Bright Court, p. C14.

New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1991, p. 12; August 16, 1992, p. 32; June 18, 2000, review of Imani All Mine and All-Bright Court, p. 28.

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Publishers Weekly, July 5, 1993, review of Addy Learns a Lesson, p. 73; November 23, 1998, review of Imani All Mine, p. 58.

Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), February 7, 1999, Renee Graham, review of Imani All Mine, p. 6.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 25, 1991, p. 4.

Voice of Youth Advocates, August, 2002, review of Imani All Mine, p. 175.

Washington Post Book World, August 11, 1991, p. 3; December 1, 1991, p. 3; July 26, 1992, p. 12.

Women's Review of Books, April, 1992, Adrian Oktenberg, review of All-Bright Court, pp. 16-17.