Three St. Louis novelists (all better known for other things) will read excerpts from their work 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 19 in the Lee Auditorium at the Missouri History Museum: T.D. El-Amin, Virvus Jones and Chris King.
The reading is free and open to the public and should last a little over an hour. It will be followed by an afterparty at The Royale public house, 3132 S. Kingshighway.
TD El-Amin will read from his newly published novel, Mia Farone: Lost and Turned Out. A daughter of Italian and African-American parents, the heroine is uprooted from her native Tivoli to the streets of St. Louis, where she falls in with a hustler ten years her senior. The novel tastefully expresses intimacy and sexuality while tactfully combining suspense and intrigue. El-Amin will sell and sign copies of his novel at the reading and afterparty.
Virvus Jones will read from his unpublished novel The Stalking Horse. This autobiographical novel follows a streetwise young black man from North St. Louis as he outgrows his parochial environment and begins to ask questions of the wider world as the Civil Rights Movement explodes around him. It veers in style from the folkloric intimacy of Zora Neale Hurston to the hard, plain speaking of Richard Wright.
Chris King will read from his unpublished novel Big, Black & Good. His novel follows the disintegration of a reality TV show about an obese black rapper named Big Carb. The show's casting call is for a rapper who is "big, black and good," but the young man from North St. Louis who wins the competitive audition turns out to be a little better -- at heart -- than his blaxploitative coproducers bargained for.
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TD El-Amin is a former host of the radio program Touching Base with TD and former Missouri state representative. A U.S. Navy veteran, he joined the service in the late 1980s expecting that the world travel would widen his perspective as a writer. Mia Farone: Lost and Turned Out is his first book.
Virvus Jones most recently managed the successful campaign of his daughter Tishaura O. Jones for St. Louis Treasurer. He is a former Comptroller, Assessor and Alderman of St. Louis. He was cofounder of the Political EYE column in The St. Louis American.
Chris King is a producer, filmmaker, musician and journalist. He is creative director of Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media, and managing editor of The St. Louis American. His most recent book is a chapbook of poetry, Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints, 2012).
For more information, email Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com.
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