Meet The Author Winning October With A Showtime Show And An Acclaimed New Book

Media Meet The Author Winning October With A Showtime Show And An Acclaimed New Book Toni Fitzgerald Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I cover the business of television Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Oct 26, 2022, 07:39am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Uzo Aduba will star in Showtime’s adaptation of the Wanda M.

Morris novel “All Her Little Secrets. ” Associated Press Talk about a whirlwind month. In the past two weeks, Wanda M.

Morris has hit two of the peaks that can define an author’s career. First her debut novel, All Her Little Secrets , was optioned as a miniseries for Showtime , where Uzo Aduba ( Orange Is the New Black ) will star in the thriller about a corporate lawyer who uncovers shady doings at her firm. Then Morris’ second novel, Anywhere You Run , which came out yesterday, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly .

Just one of those things can sustain sales of a novel for months, and Morris earned them back to back, for books about Black women fighting racism in the South and wresting control of their own destinies. “This television adaptation is the stuff writers’ dreams are made of,” Morris says. “I wrote this book because I wanted to see strong Black women represented in the thriller book space.

Now, Uzo Aduba and [executive producer] Deniese Davis , two incredibly strong and talented Black women, through their respective production companies, will carve a space for themselves and this story in the film space. I am proud and humbled that they are using my book to do so. ” Secrets follows attorney Ellice Littlejohn as she uncovers a racist conspiracy at her company.

It has a contemporary setting, while Morris’ second book takes place in 1964, against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and efforts to register Black voters in the South. Wanda M. Morris’ second novel, “Anywhere You Run,” was released this week.

William Morrow MORE FOR YOU Hiring Refugees: How One Big Factory Did It With ESAs Soaring, Tech Platform Odyssey Emerges To Help Families Access State Funding New Aston Villa Manager Unai Emery Has A Point To Prove In The Premier League Run tells the story of two sisters forced to flee their hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and how the past won’t quite let go of them. It is actually a prequel of sorts to Secrets , though you wouldn’t know it from the book’s marketing. “[The publisher] decided not to market it as like a prequel because they don’t want people to make the assumption, ‘Oh, I had to read one before I could read the other’ because they really are both standalone novels,” Morris explains.

The tie isn’t explicitly revealed until several chapters into the book. “It’s kind of like a little Easter egg for people who have read All Her Little Secrets , and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve heard that name before. ’” Morris did comprehensive research to make her 1960s setting feel as accurate as possible.

She spent hours at Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History (AARL) doing background research. “Once I decided on my topic, I walked in there, and I told the librarian what I was doing, and he said, ‘Ah, I got you. ’ And they really did,” she says.

“They kind of opened up these floodgates of books and papers and all sorts of resources that I could tap into and research voting rights and racism in the Jim Crow South in the ’60s. I also read a ton of old magazines, like Life and Ebony , Jet and Tan . ” The magazines helped her develop an ear for how people spoke back then.

She also listened to music from the period to help get her into the right headspace. Though the book has a historical setting, it deals with contemporary issues. Morris highlights how we continue to grapple, as a society, with the same problems.

In addition to tackling racism, she explores religious attitudes toward gay people, a woman’s right to choose, and domestic abuse. “It wasn’t that I set out and said, ‘Yeah, I want to do these topics,’ but I thought, ‘Wow, these seem to be running themes of problems that we are still grappling with today,’” she says. “As I started to write the story, particularly because I had these two sisters, I had some room to explore a lot of these issues.

“Every time I wrote a tough scene in this book, I had to stop and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I just read about that, you know, two days ago in the newspaper,’ and it just made me think. When will we ever finally square away these issues?” Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn . Check out my website .

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