Shawneda Marks wakes up each and every morning humbled to be considered a daughter of the King, in love with God, a wife, word artist (author, poet and speaker) and mom. She reside in the Metro Atlanta area with her patient, wonderful, loving husband. She is also the Founder and Director of the Wellness Walkers Foundation, which is is a charity committed to providing opportunities to gifted individuals to showcase their talents in events that generate funding while raising awareness and impacting event attendees in a way that glorifies God. Find out more on her full interactive website www.shawneda.com!

September is here, and depending on where you live, leaves will soon change from green to yellow, gold, and red. Teachers and families prepare for another school year. Companies evaluate their progress in reaching monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals set the previous year. Kids and adults alike wave fond and bitter farewells to summer.

September topped my list of childhood favorites because it brought me back to my favorite place—school. My love for learning and words began at a young age. By each summer’s end, I had completed the school-recommended vacation reading list several times over, with countless titles not on the list read as well. The perfect summer day involved a comfortable place in the shade and a stack of books.

While I have long since retired my ponytails and jelly beans, my idea of a perfect summer day still involves immersing myself in a world of words. Whether it is settling in under my laptop to work on my current manuscript or reading a new release, a day filled with words is a day spent with one of the loves of my life. Surpassed only by my love for Christ, my husband and family, a day spent with words is a day spent cultivating a love created to last a lifetime.

In what some consider a rocky economy, the multicultural fiction industry is still a place of tremendous opportunity for literary growth for African American Christians. The forerunners of the genre, Jacquelin Thomas and Victoria Christopher Murray, have continued to offer remarkable reads year after year. These and other authors inspire me as a reader and aspiring author to be committed to creating stories written in the excellence any tale bearing the name of Christ

requires. Readers of this fairly new Multicultural fiction genre can look forward to books getting better and better as publishers continue to raise the bar for new authors who submit work to their houses.

A must read release for 2008 is Victoria Christopher Murray’s Too Little, Too Late. and Once you’ve finished it be sure to check out titles from several other anointed, multicultural, Christian fiction authors like Kendra Norman Bellamy, Marilynn Griffith, Claudia Mair Burney, and Sherri Lewis to name but a few. Many great Web sites are available to help you stay informed about what’s what in multicultural fiction: www.goldenbookclub.info, www.goodgirlbookclub.com, http://christianfiction.blogspot.com. Whether you find your next book at the local bookstore or at the library, enjoy rekindling your passion for reading, a beautiful love that can last a lifetime.