Nia Forrester
Nominee for Outstanding Author in African-American Romance 2015
Nominee for Outstanding Author in Interracial Romance 2015
Winner for Outstanding Author in African-American Romance 2014
(In Her Own Words) I live in Washington D.C. where I am a public policy attorney, spending much of my time mining my experiences for material to write about. My intended audience is anyone who likes what I write, but one of my missions is to speak directly to the experiences of women of color who don’t fit the mold and don’t see themselves represented in gritty urban novels about drugs, guns and the ghetto, but who occasionally want to read something a little more accessible than the lyrical but complex prose of some of our best poets and writers.
WHY I WRITE:
I used to think a writer was someone who’d gotten a book deal and was able to spend their entire day working on their next novel. And as I grew my career in Washington DC, making money but not much from my writing, I decided to define myself in other terms: lawyer, wife, mother . . .
But the truth is, through all of that, and even long before, I was a writer. I wrote my first poem when I was four years old. In high school I filled notebooks with stories, sharing them with friends and classmates. And I remember being tortured during law school because I had to choose between writing fiction or reading cases.
Now that I’m a little older, I realize that ‘writer’ is not a profession for me, but an identity. I can’t recall a single experience I’ve had that I didn’t look at from the outside, trying to imagine how I might use it in my writing later. ‘Writer’ is not what I do, it is what I am. I hope that my work speaks to you.
WHAT I WRITE:
I read everything I can get my hands on, but what interests me most are stories about people struggling to understand themselves in the context of their relationships with others. Sometimes when we think we know exactly who we are, we find out we’re someone entirely different; that kind of self-discovery rarely happens in isolation, it generally happens through our relationships. The stories I write are about women as they go through that process of self-discovery. While there is most often a romance at the core of my novels, for me the primary story will always be one woman’s relationship with herself.
Books By This Author
Nominee for Outstanding Author in African-American Romance 2015
Nominee for Outstanding Author in Interracial Romance 2015
Winner for Outstanding Author in African-American Romance 2014
(In Her Own Words) I live in Washington D.C. where I am a public policy attorney, spending much of my time mining my experiences for material to write about. My intended audience is anyone who likes what I write, but one of my missions is to speak directly to the experiences of women of color who don’t fit the mold and don’t see themselves represented in gritty urban novels about drugs, guns and the ghetto, but who occasionally want to read something a little more accessible than the lyrical but complex prose of some of our best poets and writers.
WHY I WRITE:
I used to think a writer was someone who’d gotten a book deal and was able to spend their entire day working on their next novel. And as I grew my career in Washington DC, making money but not much from my writing, I decided to define myself in other terms: lawyer, wife, mother . . .
But the truth is, through all of that, and even long before, I was a writer. I wrote my first poem when I was four years old. In high school I filled notebooks with stories, sharing them with friends and classmates. And I remember being tortured during law school because I had to choose between writing fiction or reading cases.
Now that I’m a little older, I realize that ‘writer’ is not a profession for me, but an identity. I can’t recall a single experience I’ve had that I didn’t look at from the outside, trying to imagine how I might use it in my writing later. ‘Writer’ is not what I do, it is what I am. I hope that my work speaks to you.
WHAT I WRITE:
I read everything I can get my hands on, but what interests me most are stories about people struggling to understand themselves in the context of their relationships with others. Sometimes when we think we know exactly who we are, we find out we’re someone entirely different; that kind of self-discovery rarely happens in isolation, it generally happens through our relationships. The stories I write are about women as they go through that process of self-discovery. While there is most often a romance at the core of my novels, for me the primary story will always be one woman’s relationship with herself.
Books By This Author
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