PLACA presents: Melissa Castillo-Garsow

Representing the streets: Space and Place in Urban Literature Since the late 1990s, Street Literature, also known as Urban Fiction or Ghetto Lit, has emerged a new type of African American popular fiction, mainly through self-publishing and street vending. Initiated by Omar Tyree with his novel Flyy Girl in 1993, Street Lit became prominent with the bestseller The Coldest Winter Ever written by the activist and author Sister Souljah in 1999. The realities of inner cities, drugs and crime resonate for the authors and consumer of Street Literature in the places and spaces of the novels. Although they may not be the place of all the readers, the specificity, the tightness of the world reaches across cities. It is the common marginalization, the power of the streets that resonates in the imagined world these books portray and makes them important to recognize and analyze.