STATEWIDE - This edition of the Another View Bookshelf features provocative conversations with authors Jill Nelson, Danzy Senna and Solomon Jones with host Candace Kelley. The Bookshelf airs on NJN on Tuesday, December 16, at 6:30 pm, and is rebroadcast on Sunday, December 21, at 7:30 am.

Award-winning journalist Jill Nelson is most notable for her work as a nonfiction writer. In 1993, she wrote a scorching memoir of her years as the first African-American female writer on the Washington Post's Sunday Magazine staff. Now she has taken to fiction in an equally stormy way. Sexual Healing, her first novel, is the story of best friends Acey Allen and Lydia Beaucoup. Friends since childhood, the women start a business that takes them on a journey of self discovery involving identity, race, gender, politics and the struggle to balance it all. Nelson explains it this way, "I think I always write about people's struggles to reconcile the past, the present, expectations of others, the pressures of job and family and society and politics, and to still be happy. I think that's what we all want. Sexual Healing to me fits in with all that; it's just fiction, and it focuses on sexuality and desire as a way to look at those same issues."

Author Danzy Senna's first novel Caucasia, told from the viewpoint of Birdie, a young girl whose mother is white and father is black, examines Birdie's attempts to straddle the racial divide. When their parents' radical politics force the family to go underground, Birdie, who can pass as white, and her sister Cole, whose features are more visibly African-American, must split up. Cole takes off for South America with her father and his new black girlfriend, while Birdie and her mother travel from town to town, finally settling down in New Hampshire under assumed names. Torn between her new life as a white teenager and her endless yearning to be reunited with her sister and father, Birdie embarks on a soul-searching journey to discover the true meaning of home.

Senna knows first hand the complexities that come with being bi-racial. Her mother is white and her father is black. She explains how this project helped her make sense of it all. "I wrote Caucasia in part to grapple with the problem of race - I wanted to explore the construction of race through the eyes of a character who, like me, is 'everything and nothing' all at once. Through fiction, I have found a way to speak for myself and to embrace the contradictions that define my world."

Because of the book's absorbing attention to race, Caucasia was selected for the second annual Two Towns, One Book community read project initiated by the South Orange/Maplewood, New Jersey, Community Coalition on Race to foster cross-cultural dialogue through the shared experience of reading a book.

Philadelphia native Solomon Jones burst onto the literary scene in 2001 with his novel Pipe Dream. Now he returns to the drug-addled streets of despair in his follow-up work, The Bridge, which introduces the character of police detective Kevin Lynch. The Bridge is a story of urban devastation in a world that seems black and white but includes many different shades of gray.

Jones refers to his latest work as an "urban mystery novel about people who are trying to get out, people who are trying to help their children to survive, people who are trying to do better and . . . people who take advantage of that environment really for their own benefit. It's about the strong taking advantage of the weak."

Linda Coles is executive producer of Another View. Funding is provided by the Schering-Plough Corporation.