What's Up?
Finalist for the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing
WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS is a “boisterous and high-spirited debut” (Kirkus starred review), named a Most Anticipated Book selection for Brittle Paper, The Millions, and The Rumpus, this kaleidoscopic collection focuses on the lives of hyphenated-Americans with multi-culti roots in the United States and Africa.
The book spans genres – literary realism, horror, mystery, YA, science fiction – and features complex, fully-embodied characters: tongue-tied linguistic anthropologists, comic book enthusiasts and even water goddesses. The stories aim to entertain readers while also offering a counterpoint to prevalent “heart of darkness” writing that too often depicts a singular “African” experience plagued by locusts, hunger, and tribal in-fighting.
Life & Work
Bio:
Nana’s creative journey has been flavored by the lingua franca of her life experiences: the colorful creoles of her communities she has called home – the pidgin English and franglais of West Africa, the street patois of neighborhoods from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C.; undergraduate years preparing herself for a career in international law by studying Mandarin and hanzi in Qingdao, scaling the Great Wall, and chuckling at signs in Chinglish. Ten years of adhering to the maxim primum est non nocere as a Licensed Practical Nurse, gave her an appreciation of the tenacity of the human spirit and strengthened her Latin lexicon. Likewise, in law school she learned terms like actus reus and ad infinitum as she worked on human rights projects to end trafficking of women and children in the Mekong Delta region.
All these life events inform the stories she crafts. Her settings are enhanced with imagery from her travels to far-flung locales like the Angkor Wat temple ruins of Cambodia and the 2010 World Cup tournament host cities in South Africa. Her characters are enriched by the insights into human nature gained at patients’ bedsides or through briefing legal cases on matters like civil rights and gender equality, and a rewarding stint as Managing Editor of lifestyle magazine, The AFRican, solidified her dedication to uplifting diverse narratives from the continent.
When pried away from her keyboard sorcery, Nana interests are an eclectic, hi-low mashup like checking out Kara Walker’s sugar-mammy sphinx, “A Subtlety” installation one week then headbanging at Afropunk the next. Throughout her life hobbies have included years as an amateur painter and a flutist (she was a band geek who performed in the Cherry Blossom parade with a Nicheren Shoshu Buddhist marching band) to hand-crafting artist’s books at the Center for the Book. She generally loves travel, hunting rare finds in thrift shop bins, cultural jaunts to theaters/art houses/dance performances, all things geeky especially sci-fi flics - if it’s got an intergalactic spaceship or a spandexed superhero in it - she's there, and home decorating - her family teasingly calls her Martha, as in Stewart. She is currently kitting out her campus office in Jungalow-chic.
Contact Information
Management/Booking:
LITERARY / TELEVISION / FILM representation
Rachel Kim | 3 Arts Entertainment
27 W 24th St Suite 301 | New York, NY 10010 [email protected] | 212.213.4245
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).