Karen E. Quinones Miller – författare

Satin Doll is a witty, insightful, heartbreaking and honest tale about romantic relationships, friendships, and class distinctions.Bang! Being shot in the middle of the night and left for dead is what it took to open her eyes. Until that fateful moment, Regina Harris lived la vida loca with pimps and hustlers, a gangster lifestyle that supplied the money she needed to get high and forget the poverty of Harlem. Now she has turned her life around, is a college graduate and freelance journalist, and makes enough money to live on the Upper West Side and hob- nob with the city''s movers and shakers. She''s become the classy Satin Doll of the Duke Ellington song. But she can''t forget where she came from: her three best friends are from the old neighborhood. The Harlem homegirls. Regina tries to give emotional support to each of her friends as they deal with their own personal issues: Yvonne is a single mother looking for the right man. Tamika must raise two children alone while their father does time in jail for robbery. Puddin'' lives her life by picking up men and smoking weed. Living in two worlds; comfortable in neither. On a night out partying with her homegirls in Harlem, Regina meets aspiring lawyer Charles Whitfield, son of a pro-minent, upper-class black family in Philadelphia. He loves her but not her rough-around-the-edges friends. She loves him but doesn''t think she can live up to his family''s expectations. Regina tries desperately to hide her former life, but when her past is revealed, it threatens to destroy her relationship with Charles and the life she has worked hard to create. From its dramatic beginning to the fateful ending, Satin Doll is a witty and truthful take on relationships, friendships, and class distinctions.

Eleven-year-old Faith Freeman has a secret: She saw her stepfather molesting her twin sister, Hope. This unspoken truth clouds family relations for almost twenty years, until Faith decides she''s had enough heavy weather. As if juggling her career as a New York literary agent, a loving relationship with her boyfriend, Henry, and the care of her aging (and agitated) mother weren''t enough, Faith takes on the burden of her twin''s wounded psyche. So damaged was Hope at the hands of incestuous "Papa" that the crackhouses of Harlem and prostitution on the boulevards of Queens beckon as an escape from an all-too-painful reality. Just when Hope seems on the verge of turning herself around, she enacts a betrayal so unforgivable that the sisterly bond she so desperately -- yet secretly -- desires may be severed forever. With her whole family watching, Faith must call upon her gifts of language, compassion, and understanding to save her sister and herself. For anyone who has ever chosen between speaking up and backing down, I''m Telling is the story of one family''s darkest hour that lights the way toward love and redemption.

The autobiographical novel from the author of Uptown Dreams and Satin Doll Karen E. Quinones Miller is AN ANGRY-ASS BLACK WOMAN You’d be angry, too . . . if you grew up poorer than poor in Harlem in the 1960s and ’70s, a place of unrelenting violence, racism, crime, rape, scamming, drinking, and drugging . . . with a dad permanently checked out in Bellevue and a mom at the end of her rope raising you, your twin sister, and your two brothers, moving every time the money runs out— and doing what it takes to survive. But there’s more to her story . . . Ke-Ke Quinones was whip smart and sassy, a voracious reader of everything from poetry to the classics. No matter what, 117th Street—where you could always count on someone to stand up for you—would always be home. And with every hard-knock lesson learned, Ke-Ke grew fiercer, unleashing her inner angry-ass black woman to get through it all. Is this her final chapter? Now, decades later, comatose in a hospital bed after a medical crisis, she reflects on her life—her success as a journalist and renowned author, her tragicomic memories of Harlem, her turbulent marriage, the birth of her daughter, future possibilities—all the while surrounded by her splintered family in all of their sound and fury. Will she rise above once more?