Veronica Chambers Changed My Life

Veronica Chambers Changed My Life

African-American author Veronica Chambers, whose May 1997 debut memoir Mama's Girl is a New York best-seller, characterizes her writer's life as "roses above thorns. The roses are above, but there's always thorns underneath. Sometimes the work is pleasant, but it's usually thorny." Chambers unearthed her talent through a tumultuous childhood and adolescence to emerge as a promising young writer and accomplished journalist.

She is a former editor at The New York Times Magazine and Premiere Magazine. A frequent contributor to Essence, The New York Times book review and The Los Angeles Times book review, she is the coauthor, with John Singleton, of Poetic Justice. Chambers holds a Freedom Forum Fellowship at Columbia University. Her intensely personal encounter with Tupac Shakur, the L.A. rapper who was gunned down almost a year ago, appeared in Esquire.

Harlem Renaissance, Chambers's latest young adults' book, will be released in fall 1997. Slated for spring '98 is another book, Marisol and Magdalena.

While juggling a demanding professional schedule, Chambers devotes herself to volunteer work: teaching writing to New York City public school children.

"Working with those children is like breathing for me," says the 27- year-old writer.

"Some of their writings are heartbreaking as they wrestle with problems of identification, adolescence, communication, rape, inner-city violence and drugs. They desperately seek role models, and whether I like it or not, they look to me to guide them."

Working primarily with immigrant students--a New York City report recently classified the city's population as 51% nonwhite due to record newcomers--Chambers asks students to write about their personal lives for each other. Knowing many feel alienated, Chambers points out that shared loneliness can become a source of strength. While her students see only her success, Chambers sees in them the reflection of her turbulent childhood.

It is her saga of survival and triumph that Chambers--the Brooklyn- bred daughter of a Panamanian mother and Dominican-American father-- chronicled in Mama's Girl.

Her Riverhead Books editor, Julie Grau, says, "When I first met her, she was impossibly young, but already possessed a maturity because she had lived and overcome a difficult childhood. I liked her because she was so fresh and unpretentious."

Chambers's openness is exceptional considering the trauma she must have suffered at 10 years old when her father abandoned the family--setting in motion years of bitter struggle.