Prometheus 6

An Urban "Street Lit" Retirement
Omar Tyree | Posted June 19, 2008 9:49 AM

For the record, I never called my work "street literature" and I never will. When I began to publish ground breaking contemporary novels with Flyy Girl in 1993, and Capital City in 1994, I called them "urban classics." They were "urban" because they dealt with people of color in the inner-city or "urban" population areas. They were "classics" because I considered myself one of the first to start the work of a new era. But now, after sixteen years and sixteen novels in the African-American adult urban fiction game, I feel like the man who created the monster Frankenstein. Things have gotten way out of hand. So it's now time to put up my pen and move on to something new, until the readership is ready to develop a liking for fresh material on other subjects.