By Chinyere Osuala

There’s an exclusivity that Park Slope, Brooklyn boasts, that makes it different, makes it stand out. No, it’s not the strollers, or the young married couples, or the yuppie-ness, it is the amount of writers, famous writers at that, who call this affluent Brooklyn neighborhood home, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Pete Hamill. The number of cafes and writers’ spaces—even for kids—make this college-town-without-a-college a place where writers can thrive and focus on their next masterpiece.

This is the environment that esteemed Brooklyn writer Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl from the Left, thought would be a great place to feature innovative and diverse black voices.

Author Martha Southgate, left, presents the "Young, Gifted Black Male Writers" gathering in Brooklyn on October 1, with fellow authors, from left, James Hannaham, Clifford Thompson, and Victor LaValle. Photo: Chinyere Osuala

On October 1, Southgate curated the book reading and discussion,” Young, Gifted and Black (Men),” in the Old Stone House, a Park Slope recreation center. The featured writers were James Hannaham, journalist and author of God Says No; Victor LaValle, author of The Big Machine; and essayist Cliff Thompson, whose first novel, Signifying Nothing, was released in April. The event was hosted by Brooklyn Reading Works, a program that seeks exposure for emerging and notable scribes living in the area.

“I thought it would be really exciting to bring three African-American writers here,” Southgate said, “There are some interesting writers in the community, out there and I like to get them out there.”

The reading took place in a salon-like room inside the reconstructed Dutch-stone farmhouse located inside of Washington Park. Under its two-sided sloped roof, the lights beamed down on the thirty black chairs set up for guests and on the Trader Joe’s cheese and wine that host Louise Crawford, founder of Brooklyn Reading Works, made sure to mention on her blog OnlyTheBlogKnowsBrooklyn.com.

Southgate introduced the three writers, each of whom read an excerpt from their recent work. Before sharing their bios, she told the audience about how they knew each other.

Each writer had a different reading stance and style: Thompson kept his book on the podium, holding it open with one hand and pointing out each word to himself with the other, head down the entire time, and laughing at his characters and conveying considerable emotion when his character was recollecting a significant event.

Hannaham stood erect, holding his book up with one hand and a cup of water in the other, acting out each character with a different voice.

LaValle read his novel with the book on the podium, emphasizing the wods with his hands almost as if he were rapping the story.

In the discussion that followed, the trio of scribes shared their inspirations, influences and processes in writing their novels.

“I started in 2001,” Hannaham said about God Says No, “and finished in 2009.” It was difficult to measure the amount of work that goes into a literary work but, for this audience, he tried his best. “I’d say a child’s worth of work. One child’s worth. From gestation to birth, over the course of eight years.”

LaValle said the inspiration for the main character in The Big Machine came from a former coworker who was a functioning heroin addict for 25 years, as well as a rare book collector.

“I loved him so dearly,” LaValle said. “He was so interesting…and he had this long history of basically losing the fight to addiction his whole adult life. I wanted to write a book where he was, essentially, a superhero because, to me, he had been.

Thompson expressed how closely his book, Signifying Nothing, resembles his life. When asked whether it had been difficult to write from multiple perspectives, he said that he responded, “’Not really, because they’re all me.’”

Southgate repeated how important this event was to her and expressed the need to recognize more African American voices, especially those flying under the radar.

“The essay I wrote in The New York Times was about the diversity of African-American voices that you don’t hear so much. Not that we’re not there but you don’t hear [them] so much. So, I’m thrilled to hear three such different writers,” she said.

Chinyere Osuala is a recent graduate of New York University who will attend law school next fall. .