"Inner City Teens Do Read: Their Lives Represented in Street Lit" is a presentation that gives a basic introduction to the literary genre called Street Lit.

1. Inner City Teens Do Read: Their Lives Represented in Street Lit Vanessa Irvin Morris, Assistant Professor The iSchool at Drexel University Philadelphia, PA, USA Portions of this work originally presented at the Beyond the Book Conference, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, 2007. Inner City Teens Do Read by Vanessa Irvin Morris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.slideshare.net.

2. Hip Hop in Libraries Somewhere in a collection near you: - critical anthologies - history, timelines - reference encyclopedias - poetry - biography/memoir - movies - music But its biggest impact has been with its fiction… … as in URBAN FICTION, as in STREET LIT http://alphabetiks.com/images/misc/hip-hop-4-elements-sm.jpg)

3. A Connective Lens “[L]iterary work is to be considered not as documentary record of something that exists or has existed, but as a reformulation of an already formulated reality, which brings into the world something that did not exist before.” - Lavenne, Renard & Tollett, 2005.

6. Underground economy exhibited (street hustling, drug dealing, etc.)

7. Frequently a story about ‘a day in the life of’

8. Violence and sex part of story, not focus of story

10. Renaissance Genre for the Hip Hop Generation “The Contemporary CLASSICS of STREET LIT” Sister Souljah Omar Tyree Teri Woods

12. Protagonist usually young adult

13. Realistic fiction as bildungsromans

14. Signifying serializations

15. Surviving street culture

16. Exposure to cultural history as a source of pride

17. FORMATS/PACKAGING

18. Genreblending (poetry, lyrics, letters interspersed with prose)

19. Double entendre titles

20. Moral inclinations: dedications, notes, and excerpts

21. LINGUISTIC PATTERNS

22. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Latino “Spanglish”

23. Regional dialect

26. But it’s not all they read …. they do move on …. up …. And out of Street Lit … eventually. VJM: Did you read Wifey by Kiki Swinson? Sandra*: I was reading that! But then … it interfered with my Jane Eyre. Nadja: Yeah gurl! Did you finish Jane Eyre? Sandra: Yeah! I really liked that book! Nadja: Me too! Both: [begin garbling excitedly about Jane Eyre]. *pseudonym

27. Teen-Friendly Street Fiction KaShamba Williams for 16 and up KaShamba Williams for 12 - 15

28. Teen-Friendly Street Fiction For Ages 13 and up Nicole Bailey-Williams Dana Davidson Angela Johnson Piri Thomas New!

29. Teen-Friendly Street Fiction Walter Dean Myers For ages 10 and up

30. Teen-Friendly Urban Fiction Series KIMANI TRU CHRISTIAN SERIES DRAMA HIGH

31. Teen-Friendly Urban Fiction Series Ni Ni SIMONE DENIM DIARIES BABYGIRL DANIELS

32. Online Resources Drama High’s website: http://www.dramahigh.com/ Janet McDonald’s website: www.janetmcdonald.com KimaniTru’s website: www.kimanitru.com Learning About Walter Dean Myers: http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/myers.html Street Literature (blog): http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6530172.html Reading in Color: http://blackteensread2.blogspot.com/ ReShondaTate Billingsley’s Website: http://www.reshondatatebillingsley.com/book.htm TeenReads: www.teenreads.com Urban Fiction Booklist (annotated) for School & Public Libraries: http://vanirvinmorris.com Miss Domino (blog): http://missdomino.blogspot.com/ Wikipedia Article on Urban Fiction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_fiction