Shannon Holmes

1973(?)—

Writer

Shannon Holmes wrote his first novel, B-More Careful, while serving time in prison on drug charges. Published independently in 2002, B-More Careful went on to spend ten months on Essence magazine's best-seller list. Since then Holmes has turned out several more works in the genre sometimes dubbed urban lit or hip-hop literature. "It's street, it's grimy, it's graphic," Holmes said of his fiction in an interview with Melody K. Hoffman for Jet. "This isn't a lifestyle; this is my life. What's ironic about the situation now is that some of the same things I did that got me locked up is the same things I write about."

Born in New York City in the early 1970s, Holmes came of age in the Bronx, which during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s had one of the highest per-capita crime rates in the nation. Like many of his peers, he was pulled into illegal activities in his neighborhood, and in a nearly inevitable outcome entered the penal system. In 1995 he was sentenced to serve five years on drug charges. "There was this dude in jail that spent a lot of time in the library like me, I was really influenced by the writing he was doing," Holmes told the Web site BallerStatus.com about his first efforts at writing fiction. "I start putting my thoughts down and called my dad, I told him ‘I think I'm on to something in here.’ He sent me the money and it was probably the best hundred dollars he's spent in his life."

While still incarcerated Holmes inked a deal with Teri Woods Publishing, an independent house, to issue B-More Careful, which was published under Woods's company name, Meow Meow Productions, in January of 2002. The story of a savvy Baltimore teenager, Holmes's debut novel follows Netta's life from an abusive home in the projects to her leadership of a ruthless gang of young women with connections to some of the most powerful drug lords in the city. B-More Careful earned comparisons to earlier novels by two other African-American writers, Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, who also chronicled street life in frank prose. Their books had sold millions back in the 1960s and 1970s, and Holmes had read them as a teenager.

For a time Holmes was affiliated with Triple Crown Publications, considered the leading independent publisher of the genre. Triple Crown Publications was founded by Vickie Stringer, an ex-felon who self-published her semiautobiographical Let That Be a Reason, written while serving time for drug trafficking. She had sold that first book out of the back seat of her car, going on to a lucrative career as a publisher and literary agent for other storytellers of urban life. "At a time when the National Endowment for the Arts warns that book readership is declining, ‘hip-hop lit’ is finding a larger audience," journalist Dinitia Smith wrote in the New York Times about the phenomenon of writers like Stringer and Holmes. "There are no hard sales figures on the books because most are self-published and marketed the same way as hip-hop music was a generation ago: out of cars, in the streets, through flyers, in beauty salons and car washes in African-American neighborhoods. But now, as it did with hip-hop, the mainstream is beginning to notice."

Based on high sales figures for B-More Careful, Holmes signed in 2003 with Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for a reported six-figure deal. His second novel, Bad Girlz, became an Essence number one best-seller in the spring of 2004. Like his debut, it featured a female protagonist, Tonya, who is a teenager being raised by her unhappy single mother, Veronica. One day Veronica's boyfriend offers Tonya a joint laced with PCP and then rapes her; the act causes Tonya's life to spiral quickly out of control. One day, Holmes writes, "Tonya came home from school and thought her home had been burglarized. The apartment was empty. It wasn't until she saw that everything was gone except her clothes that it occurred to her that her mother had moved out. There was no note, no forwarding address left for Tonya. She was on her own…. She bounced around from family member to family member for months, looking for a stable home. She found no takers. Her mother had dragged her name through the mud, ruining the girl's reputation with their family. She told the story of how her household was broken and made Tonya the villain."

Holmes's third book Never Go Home Again, appeared in 2004. Its focus is sixteen-year-old Corey, who is awaiting sentencing as the story opens. The title refers to the future that Corey knows awaits some young men like himself who enter the penal system at an early age, are charged as adults, and then cannot break free of a criminal life once they are finally released. Holmes returned to Tonya's story in a 2008 sequel, Bad Girlz 4 Life. After leaving behind her first job as an exotic dancer, Tonya finds initial success as a hairdresser. But when her business fails she returns to her former life—this time with an even more sordid twist as the organizer of underground sex parties.

Holmes is also the author of Dirty Game, his first for a new publisher, St. Martin's Griffin. This 2007 novel portrays a man's battle to save his daughter from falling prey to the forces at work in their rough-and-tumble world, and to her own coming-of-age recklessness. Holmes still lives in New York City, where in the summer of 2008 production began on Hardwhite, a Bronx-set feature film whose script he wrote from his own experiences. "I can't write about corporate America, because I haven't been in corporate America," he joked with Bernadette Adams Davis in an interview for Black Issues Book Review. In the BallerStatus.com profile, he admitted that his writing had brought him great financial success, but was also a consistent reminder of his roots. "Every time I travel I go straight to the hood to see what their lives are like," he said. "Each time I discover that I'm not that far removed from a life on the streets. I'm not just another writer writing about things I've heard about; seven years of successful writing can't take you away from a lifetime."

At a Glance …

Born in 1973(?) in New York, NY.

Career: Author of novels.

Addresses: Home—New York, NY. Office—c/o Author Mail, St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

Selected works

B-More Careful, Meow Meow Productions, 2002.

Bad Girlz, Atria Books/Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Never Go Home Again, Atria Books/Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Dirty Game, St. Martin's Griffin, 2007.

Bad Girlz 4 Life, St. Martin's Griffin, 2008.

Sources

Books

Holmes, Shannon, Bad Girlz, Atria, 2003.

Periodicals

Black Issues Book Review, January-February 2004, p. 40; March-April 2005, p. 46.

Jet, April 7, 2008, p. 48.

New York Times, September 8, 2004, p. E6.

Online

Willow, "Turn Off Your Hellavision: Interview with Author Shannon Holmes," BallerStatus.com, July 31, 2007, http://www.ballerstatus.com/article/editorialscolumns/2007/07/3494/ (accessed August 25, 2008).

—Carol Brennan