In 2023, Kim Coleman Foote debuted with Coleman Hill, a story that follows two American families whose fates become intertwined in the wake of the Great Migration. Since it debuted, it has taken the world by storm, being shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Debut Author.
Debutiful caught up with the author recently and asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Books were so much a part of my early life, that it’s hard to say. If I loved a book, rarely would I reread it. Instead, I’d seek out more of the author’s work. The earliest two authors that stick in my mind are William Sleator and Caroline B. Cooney. I found Sleator’s sci-fi novels, Interstellar Pig and Singularity, to be thought-provoking, eerie, and fascinating. Cooney’s The Fire was as well, and it turned me on to a slew of teen horror novels published by Scholastic’s Point imprint.
What book helped you through puberty?
Books in general helped me survive puberty, which was traumatizing for me. My family had just moved from a black town in suburban New Jersey to a white one. I went from feeling nurtured academically and having black friends and a crush, to getting criticized for my intelligence (including by some teachers), feeling invisible among my peers, and having no black friends in that town. My family struggled financially, on top of that.
The Scholastic Point books and other teen horror/thriller novels were a huge lifesaver, allowing me to escape the loneliness and boredom. Some of my go-tos, in addition to Sleator and Cooney, were Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan. I also loved romance novels by Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney. And yet, none of those novels reflected my realities as a black girl.
The only black books I could find those days were written by Alice Childress, Walter Dean Myers, and Maya Angelou, but they were dated, and I couldn’t relate to living in a drug-infested ghetto or the rural South, either. Then again, before moving to the white town, I had little in common with my own characters. The first story I wrote, around age seven, was about an extremely pale black boy. In the fourth grade, I aimed to write my first novel, starring my Jewish teacher’s son and his pet hamster. I also wrote two thrillers about white female teenagers.
After moving to the white town, though, all of my novels and short stories starred black girls my age, and I’m just now realizing that that was no accident! Like me, my protagonists lived in suburban New Jersey, and they faced similar challenges. I see that I was able to create a sort of therapy for myself: through my characters, I got to confront bullies, win the boys I liked, and change my living situation for the better.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Such a hard question, because I love so many books, and then there’s the matter of personal taste. So I’ll limit to three and qualify: Damn Good Writing Featuring Powerful Black Protagonists:
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower – a young woman in California creates her own religion and becomes a prophet to her followers, trying to lead them to a better life. I love how Butler effortlessly creates alien worlds and dysfunctional future landscapes.
Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day – a healer conjures lightening from the sky in this mystical battle between good and evil in the Carolinas. Naylor is perhaps best known for her realist novel, The Women of Brewster Place, but her speculative fiction contains jaw-dropping scenes and elements that fully reveal her virtuosity.
Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave – a free man maintains his thirst for liberation while enslaved in Louisiana for over a decade. Though published in 1853, the writing is cinematic, so the screen adaptation felt apropos. But while I’m glad the movie brought more awareness to Northrup, it misrepresented some of the black female characters and lopped short one of the book’s most electrifying scenes: Northrup gives an enslaver an ass-whooping, straight out of a martial arts film. When Northrup later receives severe punishment for it, there’s still a sense of triumph, whereas in the movie, it’s all torture and despair.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Several books influenced various craft aspects of Coleman Hill, such as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Audre Lorde’s Zami. I’ve mentioned them many times elsewhere, including in my author statement, which appears at the end of the novel, so I’d love to talk about influences for my next novel, Salt Water Sister, forthcoming from SJP Lit in 2027.
Salt Water Sister follows two women who resist enslavement in 1700s West Africa and a biracial American who goes to Ghana in the 1990s seeking reparations. I’ve now worked on it for more than 25 years, and Haile Gerima’s film, Sankofa, gave me the germ of an idea. Here are a few books that I’ve found exceptionally inspiring along the way:
Sandra Jackson Opoku’s The River Where Blood is Born – follows several generations from slave-trade-era West African into the modern-day. I was fascinated by the interplays between past and present and between oral history and mythmaking, which in part led me to add the contemporary timeline to my novel.
Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness – alternates between two time periods in a South African village, whose citizens remain divided from a prophecy in the past. The closest book I’ve read to my novel’s central theme, about how history can repeat.
Léonora Miano’s Season of the Shadow – West African villagers encounter the “shadow,” which disappears people and wreaks havoc in their world. The closest I’ve read to the past storyline of my novel, which centers African people’s interpretations of the slave trade.
Anne Patchett’s State of Wonder – a biracial scientist from the Midwest goes to the Amazon rainforest to investigate her colleague’s death. This is a quest plot, which I considered using in more recent years for my 1990s protagonist. Seeing Patchett’s character face uncannily similar obstacles and identity revelations, I went with it.
What books are on your nightstand now?
George Schuyler’s Black Empire, a novel comprised of serialized chapters, where a black American scientist plots to free Africa from imperialist rule. Each time I return to it, I’m wowed that Schuyler wrote it in the 1930s—two decades before independence started to be achieved in West Africa.