~Two For The Price of One~

Well today is day two of the birthday blog not having "celebrity" name authors or poets to write about. There was only a handful of names that I could choose from today, so I spent roughly a hour looking into each person and trying to find the most interesting one. While I also enjoyed learning about a man named Steven Saylor, who wrote about historical events (I'm a history nerd), I decided to choose an African writer who had some great quotes, and wrote about touching subjects throughout her career. Please enjoy and sorry for the short blog post. I can't wait to have a historical figure to talk about and dive into for all of you. Hopefully this week sometime I'll have a great poet or author from our distant past? 

Enter professor Ama Ata Aidoo, an author, poet, playwright, academic, and even former Minister of Education for the Ghana government. She was born today in 1940 in Saltpond, Ghana. You might wonder why I chose her if she wasn't born in America? Well have patience because I'm getting there! (JEESH) She worked here in America at Stanford University for creative writing and even taught African studies. 

Most of her work was fiction dealing with Western and African world views and the tension between the two. Most of her stories involve a women who goes against the norms of women roles at their time. She won an award in 1992 for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best book in Africa. Even her poems gave her awards as her collection titled "Someone Talking to Sometime" won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987. 

Some of Her Works:

• The Dilemma of a Ghost
• Anowa
• No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories
• African Love Stories
• Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint
• Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories

QUOTES:

• "At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet."
• "For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. IT is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian."
• "People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics."

~Happy 65th Birthday Diane Davidson~

WELCOME BACK EVERYONE! I'm so excited to be doing this blog once again for my American Literature class! Each week I will post one to three birthday blogs depending on my schedule. I hope everyone enjoys this blog and gives me feedback, rather positive or negative! Today is not a great day to do the birthday blog as I couldn't find a real historical person to talk about. I'll be sharing with all of you information about a woman named Diane Davidson. She is an American author that has published books as recent as 2013. Hopefully tomorrow we will have someone from the 17-early 1900's to talk about! 

Photo by Richard Haber
Photography

Today we are learning about Diane Mott Davidson. She is an American author, born on March 22, 1949 in Charlottesville, Virginia, who, very interestingly, writes mystery novels all based around the theme of food. Apparently she has recipes in each book, and each book title is a play on some type of food or drink. This is the main reason I picked to use her today. I've never heard of this technique and it sounded really interesting to me! She has around seventeen mystery novels in total and it took her three novels just to get her first one published at the age of forty-one. Her three most famous books are titled, "Fatally Flaky," "Crunch Time," and "The Whole Enchilada." Her first three novels were titled, "Catering to Nobody," "Dying for Chocolate," and "The Cereal Murders." I'm sorry, but these titles are really awesome and have me so intrigued by her! I honestly think I'm going to try and read some of her novels. If anyone else does, feel free to comment on this or shoot me a message and let me know what you think of them. As far as education, she attended Wellesley College and Stanford University. 

AWARDS:
Nominated For:

• 1990 Agatha Award - for Catering to Nobody in the category "Best First Novel" 
• 1991 Anthony Award

She won the 1993 Anthony Award for "Best Short-story" with her novel Cold Turkey.

More Awesome Novel Titles:

I really find her novel titles interesting, so I'm going to list the titles that I hadn't above. 

• The Last Suppers
• Killer Pancake
• The Main Corpse (doesn't sound yummy to me!)
• The Grilling Season
• Prime Cut
• Tough Cookie
• Sticks and Scones (haha)
• Chopping Spree
• Double Shot
• Dark Tort
• Sweet Revenge 

Quotes:

• "I told the caterer I'd work for nothing if he'd teach me about catering. I lasted one week full-time. It was exhausting."
• "I like cream cheese in just about anything."
• I'm always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing." 
• The main thing I look for in a recipe is taste, which is different from caterers and restaurants, who first ask 'How does it look?'"

Final Notes:

One final thing about Diane Davidson that I would like to share is that in her series, the first twelve books had recipeis interewoven into the text. Basically, after a dish was described, the recipe would follow within the next page or two. I think that's awesome! Additionally, her twelfth novel titled Double Shot, she changed this concept and just put the recipes to all the dishes in the end of the novel. That kind of makes me sad. It was such a cool concept, and I'm not sure how much I like that she went against it. Never the less, Diane Mott Davidson has proven to be interesting to me and hopefully to you as well. Though she's not very popular or well known, at least I'd never heard of her, she has proven that you don't have to be from the 1700's or 1800's to be an interesting writer to talk about. Again, if anyone reads her work please let me know! I'm going to try out one of her books in the very near future. 

Thanks again for taking the time to stick around and read the blog! Comments are very much appreciated and welcomed. See you all tomorrow with a new birthday boy or girl!!!! 

-TCCR-