Today I have something very important to share. My friend Claudia Moss is putting together an anthology called To Honor the Heart: women's stories of rape. This will be an opportunity for rape survivors to lift their voices and share their stories. Please take a look at the guidelines below in Claudia's own words, to find out about this important upcoming anthology and I would appreciate it so much if you would share this information with others. Thank you in advance!
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
As a rape survivor shattering years of silence, I am compiling approximately 50 stories to include in an anthology of power, grace and forgiveness entitled TO HONOR THE HEART: women’s stories of rape.
An anthology of this nature has not been written since Dr. Charlotte Pierce-Baker shared her survivor story along with those of 11 other women and 5 men (men’s stories about the women they loved who were raped) in SURVIVING THE SILENCE: black women’s stories of rape. Pierce-Baker’s remarkable collection was published June 17, 2000.
This anthology is long overdue.
I am seeking SUBMISSIONS from ALL women (African, Asian, Black, Indian, Latina, Native, White and all other ethnicities; bi, lesbian, pansexual, straight, trans, etc.) who have survived the trauma of rape and molestation.
You are being invited to participate in this ground-breaking anthology, a loving space to embrace all of our voices in telling the unspeakable to unburden and honor the heart. If you have never shared your story with another soul, now is the time to tell. If you have already shared your story as a rape survivor, this is another opportunity for you to connect with a wider audience.
The way forward is to tell. Our telling forms a much-needed community of voices. Telling is an act of courage that may help save a wounded woman screaming silently inside.
If you are in the surrounding area, in or outside of Atlanta, GA, you can arrange to meet with me, and I will interview you to record your telling, if you prefer.
This Call for Submissions will culminate in a printed and a digital publication.
I am open to the following types of submissions: personal narratives/essays and poetry.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
* Personal narratives/essays: 800 to 1500 words
* Poetry: 3 poems or no more than 1000 words
* Submissions should be in Microsoft Word, one-inch margins. They are also acceptable in Google Docs.
* You are free to use a pseudonym if anonymity is necessary. You are also able to submit Anonymously.
Deadline for Submissions is March 31, 2015.
Send your submission and a BIO to MissClaudiaMoss@gmail.com with the subject line as follows:
To Honor the Heart submission — [First name] and [Last name]
Please direct all questions about your submission to me at MissClaudiaMoss@gmail.com.
Showing posts with label Claudia Moss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claudia Moss. Show all posts
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
How I Came To Love Spanish
Hello there. Today I'd like to share a wonderful piece of writing from my friend Claudia Moss. She is a writer, educator, radio show host, and lover of life! Claudia is currently teaching an online Spanish class and in this article, she shares with us the genesis of her love for the language and culture. Enjoy...
I was born in the postage-stamp city of Waterbury, Connecticut. It was and is a patch of green amongst heaven-haloed hills populated by people who look like me and people who don’t, their mouths, more often than not, filled with the accented music of other places---lands situated across the sea as far away as Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Scotland, Cuba and Puerto Rico. As a small girl, I was fascinated by them, these other-world people. They intrigued me, from their colorful attire, stripes over plaids and tied and untied heads, to their large families, portly elders and healthy children---long-ago, little people staring at me from where we once stood holding our parents’ hands, staring across an ethnic divide.
The fairer groups tended to nest together, to the north of Waterbury, I soon discovered, when I grew old enough to observe demographics and recall who sat next to me in the southern part of the city, in Walsh Elementary School, and who filled the Kennedy High School halls with me on our way to lunch. In the Bunker Hill area, on manicured streets, the fairer ones must have felt safe living huddled together in thick houses surrounded by fortressed lawns.
At the foot of Long Hill, though, I felt safe in a lattice of black and brown neighborhoods, where the air vibrated with the predictable music of English and the sporadic fire of Spanish tongues. In elementary school, I sat beside classmates from across the water. It was the 60’s. Mysterious new classmates poured in from the island of Puerto Rico. Boricuas, they called themselves. With names like Margarita and Rita and Norma and Otto, they left me sampling last names that tasted like Gonzalez, Arroyo, Rodriguez, Vargas and Lopez. Some were from another island. Cuba.
They were delightful anomalies. Cuban Cintron was one of the most handsome boys my girlfriends and I had ever seen. My two best friends from Walsh Elementary to Kennedy High-- Ada “Edita” Duvallon and Norma Gonzalez—even more gorgeous than Cintron, remain sacred in my childhood memories. Edita was a stout, dark-skinned Cuban, who loved reading and chatting about her native land and customs. Norma, a fair-skinned, raven-haired dynamo, set my blood to racing just staring at her fiery jet eyes and tiny frame and hearing the electric, melodic rhythm of her language whenever she got fired up. That Edie was a silent sort, preferring to hang back and check the other kids out from a distance, her lip healed from a long gash she never wanted to talk about.
They were birds.
Rare ones.
But I adored the female birds of paradise of all the birds that flew into the city that year and the years to follow. Yes, some migrated from neighboring cities, their grandparents from Portugal. Noochie and Nico. Cousins, they were jaw-dropping gorgeous, a memorable mixture with African-American fathers to stir the beauty of the races in their faces.
Unforgettable plumed wonders---they fluttered into the classroom and changed my world. I never tried to capture one, encouraging her to perch beside me, in a desk not more than an arm’s length from mine. Simply, I prayed one would wing her way to me so that I could examine her close up. Skin the color of dark caramel to vanilla hues glazed in sepia. Fingers, long and thin, drifting across notebooks and hovering over yellow number-two pencils, fingernails filed to a delicate point and painted a brilliant red. Hair queued in a tail on their backs or streaming across one shoulder, never caught up in the style my mother preferred: bangs to minimize the size of my forehead, my paternal grandmother and the queens of Africa’s legacy; a neatly parted top braid tickling my chin; two side plaits above each un-pierced ear and two stacked back braids with one plait braided into the other.
Rare beauties, these girls mesmerized me, not only with their exotic appearances, but also with the music of another language in their mouths: Spanish.
From its first sound on a native tongue, I was wholly enchanted.
To my ears, the language was musical. Romantic. Enthralling. Soft. Sensual. Like the girls themselves.
After weeks of sitting through their arias and concerts, the day arrived when I decided to master the strange “talk” of their mouths. I wanted its beautiful rhythm at home in my speech, in my ears, in my brain and under my pen. These girls made Spanish sound edible and I was ravenous. I hungered for it, same as I stood salivating in their kitchens, after school, waiting for their madres or hermanas to finish preparing an assortment of dishes de la comida criolla, the cuisine, from what I later learned, that represented Puerto Rican culinary influences of the native Taino Indians, the Spanish conquistadores and the African slaves. Their strange dinner smells serenaded me at the front door. Garlic. Recaito. Achiote. Oregano brujo. Caballero peppers. Culantro. And lerenes. But all I knew then, as a pre-teen with my hands freshly washed and my school books on an end table near the door, was Norma’s sister’s Mofongo (mouth-watering, seasoned mashed plantain filled with vegetarian, pork or seafood) was enough to make me speak in tongues with a Spanish accent! And Margarita’s Mami’s pigeon peas with rice and topped with a sofrito sauce was so delectable it made me want to backhand anybody who even looked like she wanted to take my plate. That was arroz con gandules served with chorizo and red peppers.
I never learned to prepare any of these unheard of dishes in my mama’s kitchen at 13 Wood Street. My family’s ears and tongues and palates weren’t akin to mine in taste, predilection and inclination. Spanish words and expressions baffled them. Not only that, my family never cultivated a desire to sample Puerto Rican cuisine, and they were often perplexed over why I nurtured such a fondness for “those people” and their strange tongue.
Later, when the local girls started coming around with half Puerto Rican babies, my father warned me to never bring one home. I didn’t know if that included girlfriends, too, but it never seemed to matter much, considering I always ended up trekking to their homes whenever I could after school.
Maybe my father and others were influenced by what we often heard in the media. No heartwarming stories came out of the Puerto Rican community. The media only reported Puerto Rican crime. One behind the other were heart-wrenching cases of jealous Puerto Ricans who blew their wives away, most times before the children and other members of the family, and always, it seemed, after they “caught” the wife cheating. I never recalled hearing of a Puerto Rican woman killing her cheating husband in a jealous fit. Those media reports made me feel a peculiar sort of way about Boricua males for a long time, until I was old enough to understand institutional racism.
I learned to speak Spanish without taking a class, which would’ve been a revolutionary idea in elementary school. Sitting next to my girlfriends and listening to them speak Spanish in hushed, intimate conversations on the playground during recess, I picked up the ring of the language, the accent and enough vocabulary to understand and respond when we spoke softly in groups during class.
Whenever my teachers observed me engaged in these conversations, they expressed awe at me having picked up the language so fast, not realizing, I assume, they fully expected my Puerto Rican peers to learn English just as fast, so they could be promoted to the next grade along with the rest of the class.
Before long, my teachers began asking me to sit next to the continuous stream of Puerto Rican or Cuban students, if we didn’t have other Spanish students in the class. I loved befriending the newcomers and doing my best to make them feel welcome. Today, gazing backward, I realize that I have always been a mini ambassador and willing translator.
Sometimes other adults witnessed me speaking Spanish and asked, “Is that little black one speaking Spanish, too?” Their words amazed me, considering I saw Puerto Ricans ranging in variant shades from white to black, and whenever I observed my friends’ families and others I saw downtown, when my family and I travelled there to shop or to eat pizza, the Puerto Ricans were as varied as the Black people in my own family and those who peopled my neighborhood.
From Walsh Elementary, I went on to attend Kennedy High School, where I made friends with other Puerto Rican classmates and my language prowess improved. But not long afterwards, my father began speaking of going South. For good. And before we pulled out of Waterbury to relocate to Tuskegee, Alabama, after doctors informed my father that my mother was dying of cancer, I was well on my way to a life-long love of the Spanish language and the cultures in which the language was spoken in Central America, South America and Mexico.
Weeks after the start of the next school term, a tedious road trip behind us, we settled into my paternal grandparents’ home, and my father enrolled my siblings and me in the Tuskegee Institute Public School System. Since a Spanish-speaking population was virtually nonexistent in my parents’ hometown, I welcomed every opportunity to read, write and speak Spanish, even if that meant practicing on non-Spanish speakers. Most were encouraging, some derogatory.
In 1976, I graduated from Tuskegee Institute High School, where I’d studied Spanish and was voted Miss Spanish Club for the Homecoming festivities. Being my aunt was a teacher, I enrolled at the local college, the famous Tuskegee Institute, where I majored in English Education and minored in Spanish. My passion for the language flared and burned bonfire bright. While there, I garnered the respect of my college peers and Spanish professors, who elected me to receive “Top Honors” in Spanish at the year’s award ceremony.
Today, I yet love learning and speaking Spanish.
I write the language whenever I show up on my virtual websites, from Facebook to Twitter, and to Spanish speakers and non-Spanish speakers alike. My intent is never arrogance when I do this. I do so to express my unflagging love for the language and to share it with others as a beautiful, romantic and musical gift. Un regalo de la comunicación! And what better gift in a time in which Spanish speakers account for 17 percent of the U.S. population? As these Americans reach 52 million, statistics are revealing the growth of our youngest minority group is from birth, not immigration.
For as much as I have loved learning Spanish, I will be honest and say, I know that it remains my second language, for I have yet to master it, despite stretching to offer an online Spanish class on www.ooVoo.com and recording myself reading Spanish and bilingual books for children on my radio show on http://www.blogtalkradio.com/claudiamossshow. Yes, I realize I could relocate to one of the states the NBC Latino website denotes as the places where “two-thirds of Latinos live…California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.”
Another way to master the language is to possibly follow the advice of a Latina hotel worker, whom I chatted up after one of my College Board workshops during my consultant days. With the sweetest smile, she advised me: “Get yourself a Latino boyfriend, and you will be fluent in no time!” Not an inconceivable notion, except, one, I had to edit her directive to include a Latina lesbiana to lend romance, love, flavor and spice to my language mastery, and two, my beloved cousin, who married a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican, is yet a non-Spanish speaker, so…..
Quien sabe?
I’m charmed to continue living and relishing life and loving the flavor of Spanish in my mouth and at my fingertips. And who knows? One day I may look up and she’ll be standing there, smiling and singing, “Hola, Claudia! ¿Dónde has estado toda mi vida? ¡Qué guapa eres! Únanse a mí para comida cubana y buena conversación, mi amorcita!”
--- Claudia Moss
Twitter: @TheLadySiren
Author of IF YOU LOVE ME, COME: a novel
(In the USA: Amazon Paperback and Kindle)
For UK purchases: Amazon Paperback and Kindle
SOFT TSUNAMI: poems
From Amazon Kindle in the USA and the UK
WANDA B. WONDERS: stories
From Amazon Kindle in the USA and the UK
The fairer groups tended to nest together, to the north of Waterbury, I soon discovered, when I grew old enough to observe demographics and recall who sat next to me in the southern part of the city, in Walsh Elementary School, and who filled the Kennedy High School halls with me on our way to lunch. In the Bunker Hill area, on manicured streets, the fairer ones must have felt safe living huddled together in thick houses surrounded by fortressed lawns.
At the foot of Long Hill, though, I felt safe in a lattice of black and brown neighborhoods, where the air vibrated with the predictable music of English and the sporadic fire of Spanish tongues. In elementary school, I sat beside classmates from across the water. It was the 60’s. Mysterious new classmates poured in from the island of Puerto Rico. Boricuas, they called themselves. With names like Margarita and Rita and Norma and Otto, they left me sampling last names that tasted like Gonzalez, Arroyo, Rodriguez, Vargas and Lopez. Some were from another island. Cuba.
They were delightful anomalies. Cuban Cintron was one of the most handsome boys my girlfriends and I had ever seen. My two best friends from Walsh Elementary to Kennedy High-- Ada “Edita” Duvallon and Norma Gonzalez—even more gorgeous than Cintron, remain sacred in my childhood memories. Edita was a stout, dark-skinned Cuban, who loved reading and chatting about her native land and customs. Norma, a fair-skinned, raven-haired dynamo, set my blood to racing just staring at her fiery jet eyes and tiny frame and hearing the electric, melodic rhythm of her language whenever she got fired up. That Edie was a silent sort, preferring to hang back and check the other kids out from a distance, her lip healed from a long gash she never wanted to talk about.
They were birds.
Rare ones.
But I adored the female birds of paradise of all the birds that flew into the city that year and the years to follow. Yes, some migrated from neighboring cities, their grandparents from Portugal. Noochie and Nico. Cousins, they were jaw-dropping gorgeous, a memorable mixture with African-American fathers to stir the beauty of the races in their faces.
Unforgettable plumed wonders---they fluttered into the classroom and changed my world. I never tried to capture one, encouraging her to perch beside me, in a desk not more than an arm’s length from mine. Simply, I prayed one would wing her way to me so that I could examine her close up. Skin the color of dark caramel to vanilla hues glazed in sepia. Fingers, long and thin, drifting across notebooks and hovering over yellow number-two pencils, fingernails filed to a delicate point and painted a brilliant red. Hair queued in a tail on their backs or streaming across one shoulder, never caught up in the style my mother preferred: bangs to minimize the size of my forehead, my paternal grandmother and the queens of Africa’s legacy; a neatly parted top braid tickling my chin; two side plaits above each un-pierced ear and two stacked back braids with one plait braided into the other.
Rare beauties, these girls mesmerized me, not only with their exotic appearances, but also with the music of another language in their mouths: Spanish.
From its first sound on a native tongue, I was wholly enchanted.
To my ears, the language was musical. Romantic. Enthralling. Soft. Sensual. Like the girls themselves.
After weeks of sitting through their arias and concerts, the day arrived when I decided to master the strange “talk” of their mouths. I wanted its beautiful rhythm at home in my speech, in my ears, in my brain and under my pen. These girls made Spanish sound edible and I was ravenous. I hungered for it, same as I stood salivating in their kitchens, after school, waiting for their madres or hermanas to finish preparing an assortment of dishes de la comida criolla, the cuisine, from what I later learned, that represented Puerto Rican culinary influences of the native Taino Indians, the Spanish conquistadores and the African slaves. Their strange dinner smells serenaded me at the front door. Garlic. Recaito. Achiote. Oregano brujo. Caballero peppers. Culantro. And lerenes. But all I knew then, as a pre-teen with my hands freshly washed and my school books on an end table near the door, was Norma’s sister’s Mofongo (mouth-watering, seasoned mashed plantain filled with vegetarian, pork or seafood) was enough to make me speak in tongues with a Spanish accent! And Margarita’s Mami’s pigeon peas with rice and topped with a sofrito sauce was so delectable it made me want to backhand anybody who even looked like she wanted to take my plate. That was arroz con gandules served with chorizo and red peppers.
I never learned to prepare any of these unheard of dishes in my mama’s kitchen at 13 Wood Street. My family’s ears and tongues and palates weren’t akin to mine in taste, predilection and inclination. Spanish words and expressions baffled them. Not only that, my family never cultivated a desire to sample Puerto Rican cuisine, and they were often perplexed over why I nurtured such a fondness for “those people” and their strange tongue.
Later, when the local girls started coming around with half Puerto Rican babies, my father warned me to never bring one home. I didn’t know if that included girlfriends, too, but it never seemed to matter much, considering I always ended up trekking to their homes whenever I could after school.
Maybe my father and others were influenced by what we often heard in the media. No heartwarming stories came out of the Puerto Rican community. The media only reported Puerto Rican crime. One behind the other were heart-wrenching cases of jealous Puerto Ricans who blew their wives away, most times before the children and other members of the family, and always, it seemed, after they “caught” the wife cheating. I never recalled hearing of a Puerto Rican woman killing her cheating husband in a jealous fit. Those media reports made me feel a peculiar sort of way about Boricua males for a long time, until I was old enough to understand institutional racism.
I learned to speak Spanish without taking a class, which would’ve been a revolutionary idea in elementary school. Sitting next to my girlfriends and listening to them speak Spanish in hushed, intimate conversations on the playground during recess, I picked up the ring of the language, the accent and enough vocabulary to understand and respond when we spoke softly in groups during class.
Whenever my teachers observed me engaged in these conversations, they expressed awe at me having picked up the language so fast, not realizing, I assume, they fully expected my Puerto Rican peers to learn English just as fast, so they could be promoted to the next grade along with the rest of the class.
Before long, my teachers began asking me to sit next to the continuous stream of Puerto Rican or Cuban students, if we didn’t have other Spanish students in the class. I loved befriending the newcomers and doing my best to make them feel welcome. Today, gazing backward, I realize that I have always been a mini ambassador and willing translator.
Sometimes other adults witnessed me speaking Spanish and asked, “Is that little black one speaking Spanish, too?” Their words amazed me, considering I saw Puerto Ricans ranging in variant shades from white to black, and whenever I observed my friends’ families and others I saw downtown, when my family and I travelled there to shop or to eat pizza, the Puerto Ricans were as varied as the Black people in my own family and those who peopled my neighborhood.
From Walsh Elementary, I went on to attend Kennedy High School, where I made friends with other Puerto Rican classmates and my language prowess improved. But not long afterwards, my father began speaking of going South. For good. And before we pulled out of Waterbury to relocate to Tuskegee, Alabama, after doctors informed my father that my mother was dying of cancer, I was well on my way to a life-long love of the Spanish language and the cultures in which the language was spoken in Central America, South America and Mexico.
Weeks after the start of the next school term, a tedious road trip behind us, we settled into my paternal grandparents’ home, and my father enrolled my siblings and me in the Tuskegee Institute Public School System. Since a Spanish-speaking population was virtually nonexistent in my parents’ hometown, I welcomed every opportunity to read, write and speak Spanish, even if that meant practicing on non-Spanish speakers. Most were encouraging, some derogatory.
In 1976, I graduated from Tuskegee Institute High School, where I’d studied Spanish and was voted Miss Spanish Club for the Homecoming festivities. Being my aunt was a teacher, I enrolled at the local college, the famous Tuskegee Institute, where I majored in English Education and minored in Spanish. My passion for the language flared and burned bonfire bright. While there, I garnered the respect of my college peers and Spanish professors, who elected me to receive “Top Honors” in Spanish at the year’s award ceremony.
Today, I yet love learning and speaking Spanish.
I write the language whenever I show up on my virtual websites, from Facebook to Twitter, and to Spanish speakers and non-Spanish speakers alike. My intent is never arrogance when I do this. I do so to express my unflagging love for the language and to share it with others as a beautiful, romantic and musical gift. Un regalo de la comunicación! And what better gift in a time in which Spanish speakers account for 17 percent of the U.S. population? As these Americans reach 52 million, statistics are revealing the growth of our youngest minority group is from birth, not immigration.
For as much as I have loved learning Spanish, I will be honest and say, I know that it remains my second language, for I have yet to master it, despite stretching to offer an online Spanish class on www.ooVoo.com and recording myself reading Spanish and bilingual books for children on my radio show on http://www.blogtalkradio.com/claudiamossshow. Yes, I realize I could relocate to one of the states the NBC Latino website denotes as the places where “two-thirds of Latinos live…California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.”
Another way to master the language is to possibly follow the advice of a Latina hotel worker, whom I chatted up after one of my College Board workshops during my consultant days. With the sweetest smile, she advised me: “Get yourself a Latino boyfriend, and you will be fluent in no time!” Not an inconceivable notion, except, one, I had to edit her directive to include a Latina lesbiana to lend romance, love, flavor and spice to my language mastery, and two, my beloved cousin, who married a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican, is yet a non-Spanish speaker, so…..
Quien sabe?
I’m charmed to continue living and relishing life and loving the flavor of Spanish in my mouth and at my fingertips. And who knows? One day I may look up and she’ll be standing there, smiling and singing, “Hola, Claudia! ¿Dónde has estado toda mi vida? ¡Qué guapa eres! Únanse a mí para comida cubana y buena conversación, mi amorcita!”
--- Claudia Moss
Twitter: @TheLadySiren
Author of IF YOU LOVE ME, COME: a novel
(In the USA: Amazon Paperback and Kindle)
For UK purchases: Amazon Paperback and Kindle
SOFT TSUNAMI: poems
From Amazon Kindle in the USA and the UK
WANDA B. WONDERS: stories
From Amazon Kindle in the USA and the UK
Friday, April 20, 2012
The Fabulous Wanda B. Wonders Books
Today I’d like to share two fun books that I’ve read recently and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. The two books are, Wanda B. Wonders Speaks Her Mind and Wanda B. Takes the Cake, both by Claudia Moss. Each book acquaints us with the wonderful character Wanda B. Wonders, who is a social commentator of sorts who speaks her mind on a variety of subjects and does it with humor and a zest for life.
The author shares her inspiration for creating the character of Wanda in the notes to Wanda B. Wonders Speaks Her Mind. She writes that she sees Wanda as a “contemporary twin to Jess B. Simple, the beloved Everyman of my literary mentor, Langston Hughes”. Hughes’ character, Jesse B. Simple's stories take place mostly with Mr. Simple sitting in a bar discussing his take on life. However, Wanda B. chats up Miss Lady, the owner of the establishment, as she sits in the nail salon. This makes for a very enjoyable read because it’s like you’re sitting there in the salon a few seats over as you take it all in. Wanda tells stories and gives her view on a variety of subjects as Miss Lady engages in conversations with her about a little bit of everything.
Wanda is a bold and loveable character who speaks out and doesn’t hold back on her views about anything and I like that about this character. Her authenticity is definitely to be admired! It’s hard to decide which book I like the most because the first continues so seamlessly into the other. It’s like having a long conversation with a friend as you sit on the porch on a summer’s evening with a cool drink nearby.
To give you an idea of some of the subject matter, I’ll share some of the story titles. In Wanda B. Wonders Speaks Her Mind, there are titles like: ‘Blue-Collar Husband’, ‘Face on the Cover’, ‘A Virtual Reality’, ‘No More Salad, Please’, and ‘The Deal Breaker’. And in Wanda B. Takes the Cake, there are engaging titles such as: ‘Bag of Blessings’, ‘Cuzin Bozwell’s Mean Mug Blues’, ‘Patriotism’, and ‘Pride Prunes’. The titles of each story are gems on their own that lead us to a vibrant world that the author shares with us on every page.
Claudia Moss is a masterful storyteller and her absolute skill shows through in each story. Even though the character Wanda B. Wonders is a woman that speaks her mind and doesn’t hold back, she is not a harsh character. She just tells it like it is. She gives off this vibe of love, humor and hope, as well as a love for life throughout both books. She is rightfully named, as Wanda does continually wonder about life and our world and the people we all meet each day. In a nutshell, Wanda tells us about the world as she sees it and it’s an enjoyable ride to take along with her.
So please check out these fantastic books by Claudia Moss! Each is available at Amazon in paperback here and here. They are in addition available on Kindle here and here!
Also, here’s a bit about the author Claudia Moss...
CLAUDIA MOSS is a novelist, short story writer, poet, blogger, motivational speaker and talk show host. She is a former English educator. Ms. Moss is independently published and is the author of the Amazon bestselling Kindle novel, If You Love Me, Come.
You can visit her at her blog www.thegolden-goddess.blogspot.com .
You can also follow her on Twitter : @TheLadySiren and you can follow the fabulous Wanda B. Wonders @WandaBWonders .
Disclaimer: I was sent both books free of charge. However, all opinions are mine and mine alone :-)
The author shares her inspiration for creating the character of Wanda in the notes to Wanda B. Wonders Speaks Her Mind. She writes that she sees Wanda as a “contemporary twin to Jess B. Simple, the beloved Everyman of my literary mentor, Langston Hughes”. Hughes’ character, Jesse B. Simple's stories take place mostly with Mr. Simple sitting in a bar discussing his take on life. However, Wanda B. chats up Miss Lady, the owner of the establishment, as she sits in the nail salon. This makes for a very enjoyable read because it’s like you’re sitting there in the salon a few seats over as you take it all in. Wanda tells stories and gives her view on a variety of subjects as Miss Lady engages in conversations with her about a little bit of everything.
Claudia Moss is a masterful storyteller and her absolute skill shows through in each story. Even though the character Wanda B. Wonders is a woman that speaks her mind and doesn’t hold back, she is not a harsh character. She just tells it like it is. She gives off this vibe of love, humor and hope, as well as a love for life throughout both books. She is rightfully named, as Wanda does continually wonder about life and our world and the people we all meet each day. In a nutshell, Wanda tells us about the world as she sees it and it’s an enjoyable ride to take along with her.
So please check out these fantastic books by Claudia Moss! Each is available at Amazon in paperback here and here. They are in addition available on Kindle here and here!
Also, here’s a bit about the author Claudia Moss...
CLAUDIA MOSS is a novelist, short story writer, poet, blogger, motivational speaker and talk show host. She is a former English educator. Ms. Moss is independently published and is the author of the Amazon bestselling Kindle novel, If You Love Me, Come.
You can visit her at her blog www.thegolden-goddess.blogspot.com .
You can also follow her on Twitter : @TheLadySiren and you can follow the fabulous Wanda B. Wonders @WandaBWonders .
Disclaimer: I was sent both books free of charge. However, all opinions are mine and mine alone :-)
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