From Philip Roth to Amiri Baraka, Newark has always been a city where writers work and thrive. Here are three short profiles of local authors who are keeping Newark’s literary tradition alive with their nationally renowned works.

Having money problems? Forest Hill resident, NAACP Image Award Nominee, and the first Black woman to be featured alone on the cover of Money Magazine, Tiffany “The Budgetnista” Aliche has got your back with her new book, Get Good with Money: Ten Steps to Becoming Financially Whole! The prominent financial educator and her expertise have been featured by The New York Times, NBC News, Forbes, and Because of Them We Can. Shortly after being released, Get Good with Money hit the bestsellers lists for both Amazon and The New York Times. It might be financially irresponsible to gamble, but we bet you’ll be seeing a lot of Aliche in the future!

Downtown resident Maisy Card’s debut novel, These Ghosts Are Family, a multi-generational saga of Jamaican genealogy, has had quite the year! Card earned praise in a Washington Post review calling her, “a natural storyteller,” while the New York Times described her work as “rich, ambitious.” After the praise, came accolades, as the novel was shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, won the the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (shortlisted for the overall prize), and named a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.​ With a smashingly successful debut under her belt, Card has established herself as a rising star among fiction writers.

fayemi shakur, Arts and Cultural Affairs Director for the City of Newark’s 2019 release A Womb of Violet: An Anthology was recently recognized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a recommended reading for Juneteenth. This month, the cultural critic and interdisciplinary artist is releasing A Womb of Violet Vol. 2: Blackness, Resistance, and Being, which features work by 22 Black feminist artists, writers, and poets from Newark and beyond including Salamishah Tillet, Margie ‘Mia X’ Johnson, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Amina Baraka, Andrea Chung, K. Desireé Milwood, Antoinette Ellis-Williams, Bimpé Fageyinbo, Walidah Imarisha, Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal, Noelle Lorranine Williams, tarah douglas, Dominique Duroseau, Shoshanna Weinberger, Tiana Webb-Evans, Jennifer Mack-Watkins, Kween Moore, Nell Painter, Sundai Johnson, Adebunmi Gbadebo, K. Eleven Muldrow, and Shell Spin.

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