Lori Aurelia Williams | Biography

Lori Aurelia Williams is "a remarkable writer with unlimited potential," in the opinion of the PEN American Center committee that awarded her the 2002 Phyllis Naylor working-writer fellowship. The committee members also pointed out that in Williams' books, her characters are delineated "well and quickly by their flowing natural dialogue." Williams's highly regarded first two novels for young adults, When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune and Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues, tell of Shayla, a young African-American girl from a poor Houston neighborhood who, marginalized at school and home, finds her life turned around by friends and the secrets they keep from the adult world. One friend suffers from child abuse and the other from alcoholism, and in the course of the narratives, Shayla must decide where to draw the line between keeping secrets and helping out these young women. Shayla is a "smart, sensitive narrator," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, although she is not "too wise so that there's nothing to be learned in life," wrote Martin Wilson in the Austin Chronicle. Hard-hitting and filled with the bitter realities of street life and poverty, Williams's novels are written in dialogue that is "fast, funny, and smart," according to Booklist's Hazel Rochman.

Part of the reason Shayla's voice rings so true is that Williams herself "grew up poor," as she noted on the Simon & Schuster Web site. In the Houston neighborhood of her childhood "it was still customary for children to be 'seen and not heard.' I saw many children, including those in my own family, simply hold their tongue and suffer in silence when they were being mistreated. I felt as if someone had stolen these children's voices, that they had been snatched away at night as they slept." Williams's novels are meant to "tell the stories that the children were never allowed to tell," as she explained on the Simon & Schuster Web site.

Writing What She Knows

Williams, like Shayla, was born in Houston and grew up in a "violent household, made unbearable by my father's sudden rages," as the author told an interviewer for Teenreads.com. "My mother was a very beautiful, kind, religious woman, who tried to share everyone's pain by using only her spiritual beliefs. When I tried to share my hurt feelings with her she would simply give me a passage of the Bible to read and tell me to say a prayer. I learned that it was OK to take my problems silently to God, but that it was never OK to take them to my mother." Speaking with Miriam E. Drennan of BookPage, Williams further explained, "My siblings and I didn't know what child abuse was, but we experienced it. We lived in constant fear of my father's rages and of the beatings that he gave my mother and us. When I was a small child in grade school I thought that there just couldn't be other children in the world that lived the way that we did, but as I grew older I found out that what I believed wasn't true. I learned that there were other children in my community who lived everyday with either physical or mental abuse, abused by the people who were supposed to love and protect them."

Williams, like Shayla, was an overweight child and had few friends; instead, she found refuge in books. Suffering from asthma, she would "often spend weeks lying in bed with only a few good books for entertainment," as she told Cynthia Leitich Smith in a Children's Literature Resources interview. The works of Judy Blume and Mr. Pudgins, by Ruth Christoffer Carlsen, were constant companions. From these writers she went on to the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Emily Dickinson, as well as reading science fiction of all sorts. Williams liked to write as a child, but unlike her fictional protagonist, she did not choose writing as a career until later in life. "I didn't have any aspirations of being a writer," Williams commented on her Teenreads.com interview. "At 12 Shayla already knows what she wants to be when she grows up. At 12 all I wanted to be was 13." When finishing up a degree in English at the University of Texas in Austin, Williams enrolled in a creative-writing course and was encouraged by her instructor to apply to the school's graduate writing program. She submitted a few stories and was soon accepted, receiving a scholarship; she was also awarded a James A. Michener fellowship.

Breaking the Silence

Once she completed her first novel, Williams sent the manuscript out to several agents, and when one took an interest and suggested changes, she quickly did the rewrites. The revised manuscript was then sent out to five publishers; four responded with offers, but she and her agent went with Simon & Schuster, which published When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune in 2000. This first-person narrative introduces twelve-year-old Shayla Dubois, who likes to confide to her journal when she faces difficulties in life. A resident of the low-income Houston neighborhood known as the Bottom, Shayla has her hands full with such difficulties: older sister Tia is arguing with their mother about her slow-witted boyfriend Doo-witty. One day Tia simply leaves home, and now Shayla must deal with her mother and grandmother on her own. Her father, Anderson Fox, who abandoned the family at Shayla's birth, has showed up again and started to get the best of her mother again, much to Shayla's disgust. And then there is Kambia Elaine, her next door neighbor and sudden best friend--as skinny as Shayla is plump--whose mother entertains men every night. Shayla starts to notice bruises on her friend, though the girl says they are the result of the made-up creatures she continually tells stories about. When Kambia ends up in the hospital, Shayla learns the awful truth of her friend's abuse.

Critical response to Williams's first novel was overwhelmingly positive. Though Booklist's Hazel Rochman found the first novel "too long" and sometimes "heavy with message," she also praised the fact that there are "no pious homilies." A reviewer for Horn Book lauded the "fresh and original" voice of the narration, as well as the "sympathetic characters" Williams creates. "This first novel serves notice of a writer to watch," the same reviewer concluded. A contributor for Publishers Weekly likewise commended Williams for handling such "intense material . . . [so] sensitively" in this "complex coming-of-age story that packs an emotional wallop." For Francisca Goldsmith, writing in School Library Journal, Williams's debut novel is "strong and disturbing," and written in "beautiful language." Wilson found the novel to be "both lovely and hard-edged, full of charming and loving characters who happen to live in an often harsh world." And writing in the Washington Post, Linda Barrett Osborne observed that the book is a "lyrical, humorous, wise and touching first novel that is a delight to read."

More of Shayla

Williams reprised Shayla for her second novel, Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues, a book as "brutally honest and as gentle as the first," according to Rochman, writing in Booklist. Shayla is feeling rejected and neglected; she has just turned thirteen, but her birthday has been usurped by the birth of a half-sister to her father and his new wife. Kambia, meanwhile, is still on the mend from her abuse; someone is sending disturbing gifts; and Lemm, a new friend who excites Shayla in odd ways, turns out to be an alcoholic.

Reviews of this second title by Williams were more mixed. Lyn Bryant, writing in School Library Journal, felt that readers might have a hard time staying with the sequel, as "the first novel contains all the magic." A contributor for Horn Book also complained about Williams's tendency to "overdramatize and overwrite," but also felt that Shayla's voice "is the wellspring of this novel." A critic for Publishers Weekly similarly praised Shayla's "strong sense of self and poetic language," as well as the "undercurrent of authenticity" in both plot and characters.

Reviewers have noted that Williams has a talent for dealing with edgy themes in a way young readers can relate to. "I like to write about deep topics, subjects that shake people," the author told Smith. "My challenge as an author is to somehow find a way to create humor and beauty in a world that may be filled with ugliness. . . . What I love about being an author is being able to use my talent to tell other people's stories. My stories are generally about teens who have struggled to overcome some pretty big obstacles in their lies. Being able to bring those stories to the world makes me feel very fortunate and immensely blessed."