Jewell Parker Rhodes Biography

Jewell Parker Rhodes is a Professor of Creative Writing and American Literature at Arizona State University and an affiliate faculty of ASU's Women's Studies Program. She has served as Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Arizona State University (1996-1999).

Her first novel, Voodoo Dreams, (St. Martin's Press/Picador USA) was selected for the Barnes and Noble "Discover Series" and received a rare diamond from Kirkus Reviews and a star from Booklist (American Library Association). Voodoo Dreams has been featured in Quality Paperback Book Club, published in England by Hodder-Headline, translated into German for Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag and into Italian for Sperling Kupfer Publishers. Recorded Books in currently doing an unabridged audio recording. Currently, she is working on a theatrical version of Voodoo Dreams which will be co-produced by the Institute for the Study of the Arts at ASU and the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey in 2001.

Rhodes's latest novel, Magic City, was published in hardcover and paperback by HarperCollins Publishers; book club rights were sold to Doubleday/Literary Guild. The Chicago Tribune selected Magic City as one of its favorite books of 1997; its reviewer said the novel "gleams with clarity and with vivid yet succinct metaphors. With Magic City, Rhodes has captured many truths, refining the crusted raw materials of history into a luminous work."

Rhodes's third book, Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors, (Main Street Books: Doubleday) was published in October 1999 and subsequently published by Quality Paperback Book Club.

Doubleday will also publish Rhodes's new non-fiction guide, Celebrating Ourselves: Lessons in Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Essays for the Black Writer in 2001. She is currently writing another novel, Douglass's Women, forthcoming from Pocket Books in 2002.

Her fiction has been anthologized in Children of the Night: Best Short Stories By Black Writers, edited by Gloria Naylor (Little Brown, 1996), in Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, edited by Charles Rowell (Westview Press/Harper Collins, 1995), and in African Americans in the West: A Century of Short Stories, ed. Glasrud and Champion (University Press of Colorado, 2000). Her most recent essay, "Georgia on Her Mind" will appear in the 2000 November/December issue of the Oxford American;"Evan," appears in Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Writing About Their Sons, edited by Pat Stevens (Scribner, 1999). Other essays and short fiction appear in: Callaloo, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Feminist Studies, Hayden's Ferry Review, McDougal-Little: The Language of Literature, among others. Rhodes has served as co-editor for the D.C. Heath Middle Level Literature Series for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders (publisher, D.C. Heath & Co., 1995).

She has received a Yaddo Creative Writing Fellowship, the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction, and was selected as Writer-in-Residence for The National Writer's Voice Project. She has been awarded the California State University Distinguished Teaching Award. At Arizona State University, she has been awarded the Dean's Quality Teaching Award, Outstanding Thesis Director from the Honors College, and the Outstanding Faculty Award from the College of Extended Education.

She has served as Creative Writing Delegate for the Modern Language Association and is a member of Pen Center USA West. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Drama Criticism, a Master of Arts in English, and a Doctor of Arts in English (Creative Writing) from Carnegie-Mellon University.