Sitting in her freshman creative writing class, the student starts to daydream as her professor states, "Write what you know!" Jewell Parker Rhodes isn't interested in what she already knows. The Carnegie Mellon undergraduate finds the fictional worlds of plays and stories much more interesting than real life. She loves to write. But what is her literary voice? What does she have to say?
These frustrating questions go through her mind one evening while she's cooking jambalaya from an old Creole cookbook. As the spices boil, she is drawn into the cookbook's "engaging, intoxicating ‘mixed-blood' stew of cultures, food, and faith." Among the pages is a reference to Marie Laveau, an historic voodoo queen who strived against slavery and oppression, and who appears as a character in numerous novels, especially those that touch upon the occult.
Rhodes, who is African American, feels a kinship with Laveau and, in the days ahead, is almost "haunted" into writing about her, too. She does, imagining the voices, the rituals—as if they were all a performance. The result is a story that's published in The Oakland Review, Carnegie Mellon's art and literary journal. Rhodes (HS'75, '76, '79) turns that story about Laveau into her first novel, Voodoo Dreams (St. Martin's Press, 1993).
Since then, the Arizona State professor has written 10 books, recently The Ninth Ward (Little, Brown Books, 2010). It won a 2011 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book Award, which recognizes young adult books that reflect the African American experience.
—Molly McCurdy (A'10)
