In October 2008, the Literary Ladies Book Club was established in Rahway, New Jersey by sisters, Sandi and Maria. As busy career women with little free time to enjoy friends, fellowship, adult conversation and a good “Girl’s Night Out”; the sisters decided to start a book club driven by their love of African American Literature and their shared desire to engage in honest, enthusiastic, enlightening discussions with other individuals that truly enjoy reading. In order to rise to their fullest and purest potential not only as readers but also as women, they encouraged members to empower one another by sharing ideas and materials throughout the month that promote personal growth and enhance awareness within literary, social, spiritual and economic areas.

In a nutshell, the original eight members gathered with the purpose of creating unity, friendship, and sisterhood amongst positive women of color. Presently, we have 11 active members.  In addition, our members are busy scheduling authors to participate in future monthly discussions. Currently, approximately 80% percent of our monthly discussions entail author participation either in person or via video or phone conference.

BPM:  What is the purpose for your organization? Do you host events during the year or provide services for the community?

The purpose of our group is to gather literary women who enjoy reading. We come together to fellowship and discuss our book of the month along with what is going on in the literary world. We explore many different genres and writing styles. Literary Ladies looks forward to growing the club, possessing a stronger presence in the literary world and to whatever the universe has in store. We host an annual bowling party every August and  we host the "Lunch with the Literary Ladies Book Club & Friends” every Fall.

BPM:  As a loyal reader, what are some of the things you want to see more of or less of in books?

The African American community includes people from all socio-economic levels; so we’d like to see a broader representation of us as a people overall in African American Literature. We would also like to see more books for teenagers. As loyal readers, our biggest pet peeve is poor editing. Often, there are so many typographical and grammatical errors that it becomes necessary to go back and reread a sentence, paragraph or worse yet an entire page in order to understand and follow the storyline. It is very frustrating to say the least.