On this episode of SWAG Radio, Yara Kaleemah will be chatting with Akilam and Chimia about their outstanding novels. Malika Dews fell in love with reading around 18 years ago. She’d frequent the library leaving sometimes with five plus books. She often participated in summer reading contests’ as well. When The Coldest Winter Ever was released in 1999 by Sista Souljah, she developed a love for street literature and started to read more of that genre. She chose authors like Treasure Blue, Donald Goines and several others that were authors under Triple Crown Publications.
In 2001, while following Kimberla Lawson Roby's literary work (The Rev. Curtis Black series), she found herself reading more and more. This soon turned her into an avid reader choosing different genres and also a variety of series and stand alone titles.
In the fall of 2008, she picked up A Hustler’s Son by Toy Styles. This was before Toy launched The Cartel Publications. Malika loved the book so much, she reached out to her via email and they shared an insightful conversation. She knew then that she wanted to write a book. However, she still did not pick up a pen for fear of failure which delayed her writing.
In the winter of 2012, Malika came across a contest on Facebook which required a short store submission with the max word count of 12,000. Her first day after two rewrites and a test read by her mother, the response was “girl you better not submit this. Write your own book.” That same book, is now almost 40,000 words and still yet to be released.
The creativity she's bringing to the literary world will be under the genres' of Urban, Drama, Erotica, Romance, Christian Fiction. Chimia Y. Hill-Burton was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in December of 1981. She was raised in Giessen, Germany. Chimia is the proud daughter of Arline Crawford-Stevens and Eric Hill. She is the eldest child of four children, her brothers Henry, Lemuel and sister Hadijah.