Thank you Leah Mullen for sharing information with readers!  -The SCBC, Inc.

Where are you from? I’m originally from Chester County, PA where my first book Again and Again takes place. Now I live in Brooklyn, NY.

Tell us your latest news? I recently launched my website www.leahmullen.com and my debut novel Again and Again published with www.iuniverse.com in January 2005.

When and why did you begin writing? You can trace my love of writing back to high school when I kept a diary. In fact, that little tattered book is the basis for Again and Again, which is semi-autobiographical. I was also on the school newspaper and I have a degree in journalism.

When did you first consider yourself a writer? Looking back, I’d say I became a writer way back when I was 16 scribbling in that little notebook. However there are times I’ve thought I should only call myself a writer when 90% of my livelihood comes from my art. I’m still on the journey with this goal.

What inspired you to pen your first novel? I don’t have any pictures or memorabilia from the early part of my life when I lived in Pennsylvania. All I carried with me from my past was my diary. I carried it around but I never read it. I was afraid I would be embarrassed by the younger version of myself. The person I was before I moved to Brooklyn. Then one day I just opened up the book and started to read about this girl who had a crush on a boy. And I became fascinated by this girl/woman. I read my own diary like it was a blockbuster novel! And I knew I had something. First I wrote a short story. Then later I took a class with Donna Hill and rewrote the story into a novel elevating the role of my heroine’s mother so she was also a focal point.

What genre are you most comfortable writing? I’m a trained journalist and I’m learning to write fiction. I also love to write personal experience essays. This is the form of writing that literally flows from my pen.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp? Yes, I want people to learn how to value what they’ve got in their lives and to appreciate the joy, pain, and ultimately the power of love forgiveness and self-acceptance.

How much of the novel is realistic? Every word. Not one scene actually happened verbatim, rather what I tried to do was to capture the essence of what it meant to be a suburban teenaged black girl which I’ve experienced first hand and a mother with serious regrets about her past mistakes. This doesn’t describe me, but I loved expanding my reality so I could feel what my character, Sarah Franklin, would feel.

What books have most influenced your life? The list is long. I’ll share a few titles. The Friends and Ruby by Rosa Guy If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. These books saved my life! Like my character Bridget Franklin in Again and a Again, I was a black girl, lost in a white suburban world. These books were a life boat, an anchor. They were the precursors to my husband, (the second Black Studies graduate from Penn State), my dreadlocks and of course, Brooklyn. I shudder to think who I might be without these books.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor? Donna Hill. I took several of her classes and will continue to in the future. I could write well enough before I took the classes, but I wasn’t a very organized fiction writer. Donna taught me how to use tools like the synopsis, character charts and chapter outlines to keep a story moving forward from start to finish.

What are your current projects? I recently finished my second book Essence of You, a contemporary romance. I’m currently looking for a home for this title. Now I’m writing two other romances called Resolve to Love and Skintight. Also I’m working on a non-fiction book called My Life is a Page Turner: The Black Woman’s Guide to Journaling.

Do you feel that the boom in African American writers is a fad or another renaissance? Ten years ago I was hired by a major publishing company who was in the process of establishing a line of what they called African American Interest books. I remember back then people were saying this was a fad that would soon die and the mainstream houses would move on to something else. This didn’t happen. Also with self-publishing and Print on Demand, I’m sure we’ll always have Black books available. Thank God.

Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members. The internet. Joining groups and researching other AA authors is almost a career in and of itself for me!

If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything? Yes and No. If I could start all over again from the very beginning, I would have tried to write some fiction when I first started to write as a girl. The thought never even occurred to me back then. I was either writing something for the school newspaper or in my diary. Oh yeah and some very bad poetry. I would daydream, but I never wrote the dreams down in story form. I wish I had. Secondly I would have saved all of my little paycheck from the part-time job I had in high school and instead of buying up clothes to impress my classmates, I would have self-published a book. But I could only do that knowing what I know now. So no, I wouldn’t change a thing. Besides Oprah says 50 is the new 30. This means at 35, I’m a mere 15 and I self-published my first book this year. Guess this means I’m right on track!

What do you feel is one major benefit to self-publishing your book? I like the idea of managing this project myself, making all of the tough decisions etc. It’s almost like having another baby! In saying this however, I still do want to publish with a major house. I want as many outlets for my work as possible.

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